Goodbye to cheques

Improved applications for safer online payments from your smartphone or tablet has meant that processing cheque payments has become a rather laborious task. Therefore banks and big entities have decided to stop using and accepting cheques.

IRD and ACC have become increasingly digital in the way they work and they have stopped accepting payments by cheque as most customers are paying their taxes and levy fees electronically. It was announced that from 1 March 2020 they no longer would accept payments by cheque.

Kiwibank has gone cheque free and they no longer issue or accept cheques since 28 February this year.

Now ANZ and Westpac have advised their clients that they will stop issuing and accepting cheques from 31 May 2021 and 26 June 2021 respectively. BNZ will phase out cheques by July 2021.