Under the current system, banks can take days, even weeks, to clear cheques.
They are also a big business: in 2005, in New York State alone, money transmitters processed over 92m transactions together worth $96 billion.Just as the unbanked need MSBs, so MSBs need banks: without access to payments systems, they cannot clear cheques or wire cash.
"I'm not an open cheque book.
Later it was distributed via malware attached to emails claiming there had been a problem clearing a cheque.
"We made our tougher expectations clear to Cheque Centre and they have wasted no time in making changes," he said.
We do not need to hand open cheques for currently unknowable billions to the taxpayer for things like waste transportation, waste disposal, decommissioning, security at sites, or accident clear-up.
It draws on this account to clear the cheques mailed to taxpayers.
As a spokesperson for the Payments Council says: "As no cross-border cheque clearing system exists, foreign cheques paid into UK bank accounts, and vice versa, have to be processed manually.
Many bank processes (such as cheque clearing, which can take as little as three days or as long as three weeks) are still done by hand.
That is why we're creating a new payments regulator and why we are going to consult on speeding up the cheque clearing process".
America's Federal Reserve, which handles a large portion of inter-bank cheque clearing, has seen a drop from 18 billion cheques processed in 1989 to 17 billion a decade later and 8.6 billion last year.
