Cheques may bounce out of existence

Paying by cheque may be abolished. File photo / Thinkstock

Payments by cheque may be abolished if a government review finds them unnecessary.

Payments New Zealand (PNZ), a government agency set up in 2010 to enhance and improve payment systems, reported cheque transactions reduced from about 9 per cent of total retail transactions in 2003 to 2 per cent in 2010.

The considerable decline prompted the review, PNZ chief executive Steve Nichols said.

"PNZ is considering a process to seek industry, public and interest group views on the place of cheques in New Zealand, before making any decisions about the future of cheques."

PNZ's review was seeking public consensus, New Zealand Bankers' Association communications director Philip Van Dyk said.

"They [cheque transactions] have really reduced, the question is who uses them, and are they useful?"

The United Kingdom's Payments Council set a deadline of October 2018 to abolish their cheque system.

Its decision was famously meet by a "granny revolt", in which many elderly people voiced their disgust against the council, resulting in the 2018 target being cancelled.

The same situation might arise in New Zealand, with a post on an online forum saying to abolish cheques would be to disregard tradition.

"The problem is there is still an older generation of New Zealanders who will keep using cheques till the day they die, they don't want anything to do with eftpos or ATMs as they would consider them too complicated," he wrote.

New Zealand Post is the newest business to stop processing cheques for its business customers.

There were two major reasons for stopping the payment option via mail, NZ Post communications manager John Tulloch said.

"The volume of people who use cheques has dropped substantially, and a very small number of our customers are paying by cheque."

The second reason was the inefficient and expensive process of manually dealing with cheques for such a small number of clients.

- NZPA