Can a smartphone help your cheques to clear faster?

It will soon be much easier to pay cheques into your bank account thanks to a new smartphone app, which will allow users to take a photo of cheques on a smartphone and then send electronically to banks for payment. 

Cheques still account for around 10% of all payments by individuals but many get lost or damaged before they reach the bank. Barclays, who have run a pilot of the new scheme, claims that currently around £300million paper cheques are not paid in each year.  

The new technology will also mean faster clearing of payments – funds will be available in just 2 days instead of 6.  This is just another way of how smartphone technology (and 50% of adults are now thought to have smartphones) is eliminating traditional paper processes.

Workers can also now get payslips directly to their smartphone with IRIS OpenPayslips, which has apps available for Apple, Windows and Google devices. Launched in May 2013, it is already used by around 50,000 employees to easily access their pay information.  

Paper payslips, as with cheques, can easily get lost and damaged and smartphone technology is helping to remove this problem.

Click here for a 30 day free trial of IRIS OpenPayslips.