I just scanned a cheque into the Barclays app, pretty slick
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An update on limits, for anyone needing to deposit a cheque:
Banks supporting cheque imaging in-app include:
£5,000 limit per cheque
Lloyds, Bank of Scotland & Halifax
Coutts
£1,000 limit per cheque
Barclays
NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank, NatWest International & Isle of Man Bank
Virgin Money
Starling
£500 limit per cheque
HSBC & First Direct
Santander
Banks not yet offering support:
Monzo (not currently planned, postal deposit is available)
TSB (claimed to be coming soon, posting a cheque is possible and Post Office deposit is available)
Nationwide (post is recommended instead)
Metro Bank (deposit in-branch only, it may be possible to post to their Head Office)
Co-operative Bank & Smile (post is recommended instead or you can use the Post Office)
Handelsbanken (deposits can be made by post or at the Post Office)
Triodos (deposit via post only)
Chase (no support for cash or cheques at all)
Kroo (no support for cash or cheques at all)
Revolut (no support for cash or cheques at all)
Danske Bank (deposits can be made at the Post Office)
Bank of Ireland (deposits can be made at the Post Office)
AIB (deposits can be made at the Post Office)
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Indeed!
Hopefully NatWest Group will increase their limits for NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank NI, NatWest International & Isle of Man Bank to match Coutts and compete with Lloyds, which could trickle down into other banks increasing their limits.
I can understand that they want large cheques to be imaged properly to avoid fraud, which is why they request you go to a branch instead, but with branch closures and even branch-deposited cheques actually being cleared by imaging (plus modern smartphone cameras being so good) there is no real excuse for low limits! The Post Office isn’t really an alternative as they have been known to “lose” cheques between the counter and the bank, and you wouldn’t want to take the risk of that happening with a large cheque.
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Yes, I’ve had that problem in the past. It’s rather annoying, and it makes the whole process unnecessarily difficult as you have to deliberately hold your phone away from the cheque and then rapidly move it into the “perfect position” so it takes the image correctly which is far worse than if you had to just take the image yourself. Starling allow you to manually take the image, but they have one of the worst limits for the feature.
It’s still good to see limits gradually rising though, and I’m sure banks will eventually all have higher limits over time (just as they were initially low for contactless, but now aren’t). I can’t imagine cheque fraud would be very easy or profitable, so the vast majority of cheques these days must be genuine. Especially since they have added unique hash identifiers to each cheque as an additional security measure.
Although this is good news for Lloyds group customers, it’s still quite baffling that they don’t allow cross-brand branch banking as NatWest do. Bank of Scotland and Halifax customers can use each-other’s branches but not Lloyds; whereas I believe RBS, NatWest and Ulster customers can use any of the branches and the brand doesn’t matter.
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I think they operate under different banking licences (from before the HBOS/Lloyds merger) so maybe that’s why? Or could just be they’re still on different backend systems.
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Yes, they are different licenses.
Halifax “shares” the Bank of Scotland banking license, from back in the HBOS days. Lloyds Bank has another banking license, which is also shared with certain other entities in the group such as Scottish Widows Bank. As far as I know, they are all on the same Lloyds core banking platform, but probably separate copies of it. There is at least some integration though, as Scottish Widows pensions show up in the apps of any of the group.
NatWest is also a separate banking license to RBS. Ulster Bank NI used to have yet another banking license until recently, when it was changed to share a license with NatWest to cut costs. Again, I believe IT is shared behind the scenes but probably on separate instances.
The NatWest and RBS example seems to show that regulators have no issue with integrations across brands, even if they do have separate licenses, so why wouldn’t Lloyds do something similar? They would most likely only have to build “bridge” integrations across their systems which, even given legacy complications, shouldn’t be that difficult. Presumably it’s what NatWest and RBS have already done?
Halifax had to move systems several times as they were initially migrated to Bank of Scotland’s IT when they merged with them, before both Bank of Scotland and Halifax were migrated to Lloyds’s IT once Lloyds bought HBOS. Or that’s my understanding, at least, based on what I’ve read from insiders in the past. Lloyds have history with these sorts of migrations as they also moved MBNA onto their standard banking platform quite soon as they bought them, and all their front-end apps are copies of each other, so I’d be surprised if the back-end is significantly different across the brands.
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I used Barclays cheque imaging on my android phone last week, for the first time. The process was very poor - took the photo “automatically” when in range, not when u want. Then showed a ridiculous image of the cheque, not at all within the guide lines - which was then very tricky to correct. Can’t believe it ever got through any testing process!
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Still better than having to physically present yourself in a branch or Post Office, though!
Think of the time saved with a few tries at taking the image vs having to traipse off to a branch (although I do agree that you have a valid point).
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Best. Name. Ever.
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Just fold it in.
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TSB have now added support for this feature.
That’s all the main high street banks now!
Banks supporting cheque imaging in-app include:
£5,000 limit per cheque
Lloyds, Bank of Scotland & Halifax
Coutts
£1,000 limit per cheque
Barclays
NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank, NatWest International & Isle of Man Bank
Virgin Money
Starling
£500 limit per cheque
HSBC & First Direct
Santander
TSB
Banks not yet offering support:
Monzo (not currently planned, postal deposit is available)
Nationwide (post is recommended instead)
Metro Bank (deposit in-branch only, it may be possible to post to their Head Office)
Co-operative Bank & Smile (post is recommended instead or you can use the Post Office)
Handelsbanken (deposits can be made by post or at the Post Office)
Triodos (deposit via post only)
Chase (no support for cash or cheques at all)
Kroo (no support for cash or cheques at all)
Revolut (no support for cash or cheques at all)
Danske Bank (deposits can be made at the Post Office)
Bank of Ireland (deposits can be made at the Post Office)
AIB (deposits can be made at the Post Office)
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Just got a cheque for Amex (over paid my card 
).
If only I could easily deposit it to my Monzo account 
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They said they couldn’t verify my bank details via equifax (?) automatically so issued the cheque. I didn’t realise they were doing that until I noticed my balance went to 0
Cheque imaging back on the agenda!
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Great news! So many people on here said Monzo would never do it and that cheques were obsolete. I’m glad they saw sense…
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Don’t count your chickens just yet.
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I forgot about that! 
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Great news!
Not to put a downer on it but Monzo have been “actively working” on this before and then it stalled.
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