Credit Card Cheque Action Questioned

UK payments association APACS has questioned the necessity for the government to impose legislation relating to the transparency of credit card cheque fees.

Recent research from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) demonstrated that consumers were often caught cold by the nature of the charges, and sometimes by their very existence – and the regulator called on the government to impose rules to ensure the lucidity of information relating to them.

Mark Bowerman of APACS said, though, that the banking code already covered most of the OFT's suggestions.

He explained: "Terms and conditions are circulated with the cheques. The only thing that isn’t in there is the opt-in [suggested by the OFT to ensure that the cheques are not distributed unless requested explicitly by a customer]."

Mr Bowerman proceeded to state that an opt-in clause would be unnecessary given the fact that, while the cheques may sometimes be received despite not having been asked for, there is already an "opt-out" option in existence.

He suggested that there was only room for one of these two possible clauses, and continued: "Opt-in versus opt-out will be discussed at the review of the banking code."