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Boots gives ‘old-fashioned’ cheques the boot

Your Money
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Your Money
Posted:
Updated:
18/04/2007

Boots the chemist is banning cheques from its 1,500 UK and Republic of Ireland stores from 1st May after conceding that most people now use either credit cards or debit cards to move funds from their UK current accounts.

The High Street retailer said that the move came after a successful trial period in Surrey and Sussex, and that transactions paid for by cheques now only accounted for 0.1% of the total number of purchases made across the group.

Garage chain Shell brought in such a ban in 2005 as it found that customers were increasingly using chip and pin and debit cards for their purchases, rather than depending on the laborious use of cheques to pay for goods from their UK current accounts.

Boots spokesperson Donal McCabe said: “Since chip and pin has arrived the use of cheques has dropped dramatically.

“Unfortunately, cheques still pose probably the highest risk of fraud to ourselves and to our customers and, because they are increasingly not used at all to move money from UK current accounts, we are phasing them out completely.”

Chip and pin technician Steve Windsor said: “Cheques are increasingly an old-fashioned way of paying for goods and services and I would not be surprised if they disappeared completely in the next five to 10 years.”

 


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