page_title: Cheque
section_title: Modern era
hierarchical_section_title: Cheque / History / Modern era
caption_attribution_description: English: Scan by contributor of cheque of contributor's deceased mother. (talk) 13:36, 7 February 2010 (UTC)
context_page_description: A cheque, or check, is a document that orders a bank to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The person writing the cheque, known as the drawer, has a transaction banking account where their money is held. The drawer writes the various details including the monetary amount, date, and a payee on the cheque, and signs it, ordering their bank, known as the drawee, to pay that person or company the amount of money stated.
  Definition of a cheque as per The National Provincial Bank circa 1968 was "an unconditional order in writing drawn on a Banker, signed by the drawer, instructing the Banker to pay on demand a sum certain in money to or to the order of a specified person or to Bearer and which does not order any act to be done in addition to the payment of money".
  Although forms of cheques have been in use since ancient times and at least since the 9th century, it was during the 20th century that cheques became a highly popular non-cash method for making payments and the usage of cheques peaked.
context_section_description: By the 17th century, bills of exchange were being used for domestic payments in England. Cheques, a type of bill of exchange, then began to evolve. Initially they were called drawn notes, because they enabled a customer to draw on the funds that he or she had in the account with a bank and required immediate payment. These were handwritten, and one of the earliest known still to be in existence was drawn on Messrs Morris and Clayton, scriveners and bankers based in the City of London, and dated 16 February 1659.
  In 1717, the Bank of England pioneered the first use of a pre-printed form. These forms were printed on "cheque paper" to prevent fraud, and customers had to attend in person and obtain a numbered form from the cashier. Once written, the cheque was brought back to the bank for settlement. The suppression of banknotes in eighteenth-century England further promoted the use of cheques.
  Until about 1770, an informal exchange of cheques took place between London banks. Clerks of each bank visited all the other banks to exchange cheques, while keeping a tally of balances between them until they settled with each other. Daily cheque clearing began around 1770 when the bank clerks met at the Five Bells, a tavern in Lombard Street in the City of London, to exchange all their cheques in one place and settle the balances in cash. This was the first bankers' clearing house.
  Provincial clearing houses were established in major cities throughout the UK to facilitate the clearing of cheques on banks in the same town. Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield and Southampton all had their own clearing houses.
  In America, the Bank of New York, after its establishment by Alexander Hamilton in 1784, began issuing cheques. The oldest surviving example of a complete American chequebook from the 1790s was discovered by a family in New Jersey. The documents are in some ways similar to modern-day checks, with some data pre-printed on sheets of paper alongside blank spaces for where other information could be hand-written as needed.
  It is thought that the Commercial Bank of Scotland was the first bank to personalize its customers' cheques, in 1811, by printing the name of the account holder vertically along the left-hand edge. In 1830 the Bank of England introduced books of 50, 100, and 200 forms and counterparts, bound or stitched. These cheque books became a common format for the distribution of cheques to bank customers.
  In the late 19th century, several countries formalized laws regarding cheques. The UK passed the Bills of Exchange Act 1882, and India passed the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881; which both covered cheques.
  In 1931 an attempt was made to simplify the international use of cheques by the Geneva Convention on the Unification of the Law Relating to Cheques. Many European and South American states as well as Japan joined the convention. However, countries including the US and members of the British Commonwealth did not participate and so it remained very difficult for cheques to be used across country borders.
  In 1959 a standard for machine-readable characters (MICR) was agreed and patented in the US for use with cheques. This opened the way for the first automated reader/sorting machines for clearing cheques. As automation increased, the following years saw a dramatic change in the way in which cheques were handled and processed. Cheque volumes continued to grow; in the late 20th century, cheques were the most popular non-cash method for making payments, with billions of them processed each year. Most countries saw cheque volumes peak in the late 1980s or early 1990s, after which electronic payment methods became more popular and the use of cheques declined.
  In 1969 cheque guarantee cards were introduced in several countries, allowing a retailer to confirm that a cheque would be honoured when used at a point of sale. The drawer would sign the cheque in front of the retailer, who would compare the signature to the signature on the card and then write the
caption: An English cheque from 1956 having a bank clerk's red mark verifying the signature, a two-pence stamp duty, and holes punched by hand to cancel it. This is a "crossed cheque" disallowing transfer of payment to another account.
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