Back in December 2009, the board of the United Kingdom Payments Council set 31 October 2018 as the date when paper cheques (or checks) would be totally phased out in the UK. The Payments Council believed [PDF] that with the public using fewer cheques every year, with most major retailers refusing to accept cheques, and with the advent of mobile checking and other electronic forms of transferring money promising to appear in the next few years, cheques could easily be eliminated within a decade.

But things didn’t go quite according to plan.