George
Mathew, Indian Express: :Cheque transactions are going to be
faster, less risky by the end of this calendar year. All banks including
regional rural banks and co-operative banks will have to compulsorily
switch over to the new Cheque Truncation System (CTS) from December 31,
2012. The implications are huge for the banking system that deals with
up to 6 million cheques valued at about Rs 50,000 crore daily. For
instance, RBI data shows that 107 million cheques worth Rs 7,81,300
crore traveled through the clearance centres in August 2012.
From the New Year, banks will accept
only CTS 2010 standard cheques at their counters. This would means
borrowers who had given post-dated cheques to finance companies and
housing finance firms for their monthly loan repayments will have to
replace their current cheques with CTS 2010 cheques. The RBI had already
directed banks to issue only multi-city and payable at par CTS-2010
cheques to customers from September 30, 2012. Delhi including the NCR
and Chennai will see the least impact as banks here are already on the
new platform. This is the reason why no cheques can carry an alteration
now even when signed by the customer.
CTS-2010 is essentially a collection of
standards that make all cheques from every bank largely homogeneous.
They carry some common basic features that help the banks where a
customer deposits a cheque to identify the genuineness of the
instrument. Bankers say the homogeneity in security features act as
deterrent against frauds, and the fixed field placement specifications
facilitate straight-through-processing at drawee banks’ end through the
use of optical or image character recognition technology.
