非现金支付手段的发展
The Development of Non-cash Payment Instrument
谷啸 gu xiao
【关键词】cash, cheque, e-payment, security
【全文】
The Development of Non-cash Payment Instrument and Security Issues
INTRODUCTION
The origins of money are traced back to the domestication of cattle sometime between 9000 and 6000 B.C. Both livestock and grain were used as money by many societies during this time period. AD 806, the first paper banknotes appeared in China. Today, currency continues to change and develop, the non-cash payment instrument, however, has outweighed market growth for saving the cardholder the inconvenience of carrying large amounts of cash.
Efficient non-cash means of payment–which should be at the same time user-friendly, widely accepted, reliable and available at relatively low cost-are essential to a modern economy. Since efficiency is dependent on security, the introduction of the highest economically viable level of technical security is a prerequisite, and improvement of security levels should be measured by monitoring fraud statistics or by independent benchmarking of security. In this article, the issues about the development of non-cash payment instrument and how to prevent the fraud and counterfeiting will be concentrated.
I. Cheques
The term "paper based payments" is used to distinguish such payments from forms of electronic payments, including bills of exchange, cheques, promissory notes, drafts, settlement vouchers, money orders etc. Of course, cheques are the most common type of paper-based payment. Legally, a cheque is a specific type of bill of exchange namely a bill drawn on a bank payable on demand.
History and Status quo
The cheque is the most common method of making a non-cash payment in modern transactions. Although cheques were first used in the late seventeenth century, they did not come into general use until the second quarter of the nineteenth century. It has been estimated in 1929 that 90 per cent of the internal financial and wholesale trading transactions in UK were settled by cheque, and even more development during the last 30 years has been the growing use of the cheque system by private individuals for all manner of payment. However, their usage did not start to significantly increase until after the mid 1960s when there was a marked increase in the number of bank account holders and cheque guarantee cards were introduced.
The number of cheques used increased more than ten times from approximately 300 million in 1915 to 3,883 million in 1990. Cheque volumes reached a peak in 1990 but usage has fallen since then, which is the first time after World War II, mainly owing to increased use of plastic cards and direct debits by personal customers. Overall cheque volumes are expected to continue to fall from a level of 2.8 billion in 1999 to about 1.7 billion by 2009. Cheques are no longer the predominant means of non-cash payment in the UK. In 1990 cheques accounted for 57.7% of the annual APACS clearings volumes, whereas direct debit made up 19.9% of those volumes; by 2000, those figures were 34.2% and 37.8% respectively. More than four times as many payments are now made with debit cards than with guaranteed cheques.
