State Bank of India today said it will from January 1 accept only those cheques which conform to new standards.

The step has been taken as per the direction of the Reserve Bank of India.

To meet the objective, SBI has asked all its branches to issue only with uniform features conforming to CTS 2010 standard cheques to their customers.

All other banks including private sector and foreign banks have also started the process of phasing out of non-CTS cheques for migration to this system.

For standardisation and enhancement of security features in cheque forms and its migration to CTS 2010 standard, all branches of the bank will now issue only CTS 2010 standard cheques to their customers, SBI said in a public notice.

“Non-CTS cheques will be out of circulation with effect from December 31, 2012, and will not be acceptable in the clearing system also,” it said.

All customers of the bank are requested to contact their branches immediately to submit their requisition for issuance of CTS 2010 standard cheques and surrender their existing non-CTS cheques for cancellation, it added.

The homogeneity in security features of CTS 2010 standard cheques will act as deterrent against frauds, and the fixed field placement specifications facilitate straight-through-processing at drawee banks’ end through the use of optical or image character recognition technology.

The introduction of new cheque standards ‘CTS 2010’ was warranted on account of several developments in the cheque clearing namely growing use of multi-city and payable-at-par cheques at any branch of a bank, increasing popularity of speed clearing for local processing of outstation cheques and implementation of grid based CTS for image-based cheque processing etc.

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