Cheque clearing or bank clearance is the process of moving cash from the bank on which a cheque is drawn to the bank in which it was deposited, usually accompanied by the movement of the cheque to the paying bank, either in the traditional physical paper form or digitally under a cheque truncation system. This process is called the clearing cycle and normally results in a credit to the account at the bank of deposit, and an equivalent debit to the account at the bank on which it was drawn, with a corresponding adjustment of accounts of the banks themselves. If there are not enough funds in the account when the cheque arrived at the issuing bank, the cheque would be returned as a dishonoured cheque marked as non-sufficient funds.
The Abbey National Building Society was formed in 1944 by the merger of the Abbey Road and the National building societies.
Yorkshire Bank is a trading name used by Clydesdale Bank plc for its retail banking operations in England.
The Australian financial system consists of the arrangements covering the borrowing and lending of funds and the transfer of ownership of financial claims in Australia, comprising:
A cheque, or check, is a document that orders a bank to pay a specific amount of money from a person's account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The person writing the cheque, known as the drawer, has a transaction banking account where their money is held. The drawer writes the various details including the monetary amount, date, and a payee on the cheque, and signs it, ordering their bank, known as the drawee, to pay that person or company the amount of money stated.
Bacs Payment Schemes Limited (Bacs), previously known as Bankers' Automated Clearing System, is the organisation with responsibility for the schemes behind the clearing and settlement of UK automated payment methods Direct Debit and Bacs Direct Credit, as well as the provision of managed services for third parties. Bacs became a subsidiary of Pay.UK on 1 May 2018, and as a result of this, overall responsibility for the operations of Direct Debit, Bacs Direct Credit, the Current Account Switch Service, Cash ISA Transfer Service and the Industry Sort Code Directory was handed over to Pay.UK.
National Girobank was a British public sector financial institution run by the General Post Office that opened for business in October 1968. It started life as Post Office Giro but went through several name changes, becoming National Giro then National Girobank and finally Girobank plc before being absorbed into Alliance & Leicester plc in 2003.
The Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS) is real-time gross settlement payment system used for sterling transactions in the United Kingdom.
A Direct Debit or direct withdrawal is a financial transaction in which one person withdraws funds from another person's bank account. Formally, the person who directly draws the funds instructs his or her bank to collect an amount directly from another's bank account designated by the payer and pay those funds into a bank account designated by the payee. Before the payer's banker will allow the transaction to take place, the payer must have advised the bank that he or she has authorized the payee to directly draw the funds. It is also called pre-authorized debit (PAD) or pre-authorized payment (PAP). After the authorities are set up, the direct debit transactions are usually processed electronically.
Sort codes are the domestic bank codes used to route money transfers between financial institutions in the United Kingdom, and historically in the Republic of Ireland. They are six-digit hierarchical numerical addresses that specify clearing banks, clearing systems, regions, large financial institutions, groups of financial institutions and ultimately resolve to individual branches. In the UK they continue to be used to route transactions domestically within clearance organisations and to identify accounts, while in the Republic of Ireland they have been deprecated and replaced by the SEPA systems and infrastructure.
The Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) is a United States private clearing house for large-value transactions. By 2015, it was settling well over US$1.5 trillion a day in around 250,000 interbank payments in cross border and domestic transactions. Together with the Fedwire Funds Service, CHIPS forms the primary U.S. network for large-value domestic and international USD payments where it has a market share of around 96%. CHIPS transfers are governed by Article 4A of Uniform Commercial Code.
Banking in the United Kingdom can be considered to have started in the Kingdom of England in the 17th century. The first activity in what later came to be known as banking was by goldsmiths who, after the dissolution of English monasteries by Henry VIII, began to accumulate significant stocks of gold.
Faster Payments Service (FPS) is a United Kingdom banking initiative to reduce payment times between different banks' customer accounts to typically a few seconds, from the three working days that transfers usually take using the long-established BACS system. CHAPS, which was introduced in 1984, provides a limited faster-than-BACS service for "high value" transactions, while FPS is focused on the much larger number of smaller payments, subject to limits set by the individual banks, with some allowing Faster Payments of up to £250,000. Transfer time, while expected to be short, is not guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that the receiving institution will immediately credit the payee's account.
The Royal Bank of Scotland is a major retail and commercial bank in Scotland. It is one of the retail banking subsidiaries of NatWest Group, together with NatWest and Ulster Bank. The Royal Bank of Scotland has around 700 branches, mainly in Scotland, though there are branches in many larger towns and cities throughout England and Wales. The bank is completely separate from the fellow Edinburgh-based bank, the Bank of Scotland, which pre-dates the Royal Bank by 32 years. The Royal Bank of Scotland was established in 1724 to provide a bank with strong Hanoverian and Whig ties.
National Westminster Bank, commonly known as NatWest, is a major retail and commercial bank in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1968 by the merger of National Provincial Bank and Westminster Bank. In 2000, it became part of The Royal Bank of Scotland Group, which was re-named NatWest Group in 2020. Following ringfencing of the Group's core domestic business, the bank became a direct subsidiary of NatWest Holdings; NatWest Markets comprises the non-ringfenced investment banking arm.
A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be performed either directly or indirectly through capital markets.
Direct Corporate Access (DCA) is part of the Faster Payments Service which provides a same day clearing payment service to UK member banks. Direct Corporate Access (DCA) will provide Banks' business customers with direct access to the Faster Payments Service (FPS) clearing service in a very similar way that Bacstel-IP provides access to BACS.
Santander UK plc is a British bank, wholly owned by the Spanish Santander Group. Santander UK plc manages its affairs autonomously, with its own local management team, responsible solely for its performance.
Vocalink is a payment systems company headquartered in the United Kingdom, created in 2007 from the merger between Voca and LINK. It designs, builds and operates the UK payments infrastructure, which underpins the provision of the Bacs payment system and the UK ATM LINK switching platform covering 65,000 ATMs and the UK Faster Payments systems.
Paym is a mobile payment system provided by banks and building societies in the United Kingdom. Recipients are identified by their mobile phone number instead of bank details such as sort code and account number.
