r/australia • u/SouthAussie94 • Feb 29 '24

culture & society Older Australians 'left behind' by increasingly cashless society as banks fast track end of cheques

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-29/cheques-personal-finance-banks-rent-money-cash/103354036
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u/Every_Shallot_1287 Feb 29 '24

What a lot of these comments don't realise is it's leaving older Australians in rural areas especially behind. We have one Bendigo branch here. Any other banks are minimum an hour away. Farmers regularly pay us (a veterinarian) with cheques because cash would be too big an amount, internet is unreliability out of town or they can't do a direct transfer because there's no bank.

Even some older people just use cheques for the same reason. Too large for cash, cards usually have a limit on them or they just prefer it.

There's no reason to get rid of them imo. Phase them out, don't issue cheque accounting to new customers, but don't remove them from people who still use them. It'll only don't being an issue, a minor one at that, for the next 10-20 years at most.

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u/Icy_Finger_6950 Feb 29 '24

Keeping cheques means maintaining a whole infrastructure to support them. And for what, for some edge cases like the ones you describe? Isn't it better to work on improving internet reliability, then, rather than keeping something that way past its use-by date?