£1k per cheque, up to £2k per day
I don’t use Lloyds myself but am assuming its the same as for Halifax, which is described here - Halifax UK | Cheque Deposit FAQs | Online Services
Barclays, plus all the Lloyds brands (including Halifax and Bank of Scotland) seem to have set the limit at £1,000 per cheque.
Starling have a £500 limit per cheque as others have said.
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I am confused how Monzo manages to launch in USA without cheque imaging functionality.
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Monzo hasn’t really launched in the States, though. It’s s limited, invite only, beta for the time being. I think/hope that when they launch properly there will be “check” functionality as the regressive American system seems to need it.
That said, if Monzo US gets cheque imaging, then that doesn’t mean the UK will. Taking a photo in-app is technically straightforward: it’s the cost of becoming a member of the UK scheme, and regulation, legal work etc that comes with it that would likely be the blocker.
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As an existing example, Santander has it for US customers but not UK customers
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I don’t think either ever will.
The longer it goes, the less either are needed. By the time Monzo get around to a full web experience, other banks will be going mobile only. Virgin are shutting theirs soon and going mobile only.
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A few years back, when I suggested that Monzo UK could get cheque imaging if it arrived in the USA, @simonb stated:
I also wonder whether the delay on Monzo UK getting cheque imaging could also be because Monzo’s correspondent bank (Natwest), who deals with cheque depositing for Monzo, doesn’t do cheque imaging for retail customers and is just now trialing it for business customers.
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I suppose, put another way, the actual scanning / in-app changes are relatively trivial. It’s the backend that’s the tricky bit - and it’s really more critical for the States than for the UK.
My instinct is that correspondent banks are a thing of the past with consumer cheque imaging. Indeed, I’m not sure that a third party processing retail cheque imaging is even possible.
Perhaps more interestingly, the whole cheque clearing system was overhauled as part of cheque imaging. The retail (scan in the app) side we see is just the tip of the iceberg. If I remember correctly (and I am a bit hazy here) - and what I think the sticker might be for Monzo - participating banks needs to buy into the Cheque and Finance Clearing Company. And by buy in I mean literally: it’s a company co owned by participating banks, so up front capital expenditure is required (I think).
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I think they’ve done it with their credit cards but I didn’t know they were doing it with anything else.
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Sorry, I should have made that a bit clearer!
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I was quite surprised when HSBC added cheque imaging functionality to its mobile app, as I didn’t think the volumes would warrant the investment in the development work it required.
That said, my mum still pays me certain things by cheque because she doesn’t want to sign up to internet banking and often doesn’t have much cash on her either. I’ve therefore used HSBC’s cheque imaging facility quite a lot and must say it’s great. Never had any rejections and the money is paid into my account promptly.
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Yep I’ve found it pretty decent at crediting although from a UX perspective found the Starling version quicker to use and less picky about moving the camera up and down.
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I think that on the backend, all cheque processing these days is done via imaging. As @Peter_G said, the retail side is the top of the iceberg – the whole system has been re-engineered. So if you deposit in a branch (or post in to Monzo), someone is going to have to scan the cheque in at some point. From HSBC’s perspective, adding cheque imaging to the app could very well be a cost savings, as now the customer is doing the scanning rather than an HSBC employee.
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I don’t think it is this as NatWest is a cheque clearing bank in it’s own right and a member of the ICS - so it directly clears cheques via imaging, even though customers cannot image their own cheques in-app.
Monzo would presumably provide the imaged cheques to feed in to the backend in the same way as they do currently, it’s just that now they image them at Monzo HQ but in a potential future implementation of this feature customers would be scanning the cheques. You still end up with an image of the cheque either way.
The clearing system for cheques is now fully image based anyway, as paper based clearing has now shut down, so I don’t think the front-end would make much difference to the backend.
The question for Monzo would be, would they use NatWest as a correspondent bank (like they do currently) or would they join the ICS and clear the cheques themselves (like Starling now do, and they were initially planning when first exploring this feature).
You are right, except it was the “Cheque & Credit Clearing Company”, and the new scheme is called Image Clearing System, or ICS.
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Latest list of participants, including Starling Bank:
(I see from Discourse’s dire warnings that @Peter_G shared the same link before, but that was 24/12/2018, so I am sure he will forgive me sharing it again at this remove!)
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I think it’s most helpful to re-share the link at this time @SouthseaOne!
Don’t worry about it.
(And yes, that is the list of member institutions I was meaning earlier). Monzo could always switch correspondent banks if NatWest can’t/won’t be a good partner for image clearing - ClearBank would probably be good.
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To you. There a lots of ppl who like cheques even if you do not.
Are there people out there who actually like cheques? 
I thought it was more of a tollerance thing. Some tolerate them more than others but we all agree there’s nothing good about them and we’d rather they were gone all together?
How unsavoury!!
Looks like we’ve got two topics on cheque imagining on the go.
I’m gonna close this one, let’s take the conversation over here:
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