Barclays Bank is inviting another one million customers to take part in its trial for depositing cheques digitally. Corporate customers and charities will also be included in a further roll-out scheduled for 2015.

The bank’s new technology, a first for the UK, has been available to an increasing number of retail customers since June 2014, allowing them to pay in cheques using their iPhone. Barclays said that the feature had received “extremely positive feedback”, with 90 per cent of users reporting that it enabled them to do everything they wanted.

Participating customers take a photo of the cheque they want to deposit on their smartphone, before filling in a simple electronic deposit form and hitting send at any time of day. The money is available for withdrawal instantly, and the cheque cleared in a maximum of two working days (one day if it is deposited by 4pm), rather than the current six days.

Next year’s corporate pilot will see Barclays’ business customers – who still bank 46 million cheques a year – able to scan and upload cheques using software on their office computers or by logging into a website. They will have immediate visibility of and access to the funds. However, they will still need to wait the standard six days to ensure the cheque does not bounce – although Barclays said that it would trialling improvements to this timeline.

Barclays will also be looking to introduce the technology to charities, who still receive a large proportion of their donations as cheques. An extension of the pilot to Android-based smartphones is also on the cards for 2015.

Barclays’ personal and corporate banking chief executive, Ashok Vaswani, said: “Our customers really appreciate the cheque imaging service, and so we are delighted to be extending the service to a million more people in time for Christmas, as well as looking to roll this out to our corporate clients. Innovations like this are all about giving our customers more choice, saving them time and money, and ensuring they can do their banking where and when it suits them best.”

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