The End of the Cheque

KINGSTON, Jamaica — For generations, the cheque was one of the quiet foundations of Jamaican commerce.

Businesses paid suppliers with them. Churches required two signatures before issuing them. Lawyers used manager’s cheques to close property deals. Government departments issued them. Families used them to settle large bills without carrying cash.

Now Jamaica is preparing to bring that era to an end.

From September 1, 2026, Jamaican-dollar cheques valued at J$1 million or more stopped being processed through the national clearing system. The ceiling is scheduled to fall to J$500,000 on March 1, 2027, then J$100,000 on September 1, 2027. On March 1, 2028, Jamaican-dollar cheque negotiation through the system is due to end altogether.

But what appeared to be another step in Jamaica’s march towards digital banking has now become a Supreme Court fight over something much bigger: whether the Bank of Jamaica has the legal authority to make that decision.

The challenge

Pastor Jeffrey Shuttleworth and Bishop Basil Hanson filed an application in the Supreme Court’s Civil Division on September 28, seeking permission for judicial review of the policy.

Their attorney is Hugh Wildman. The respondents are BOJ Governor Dr Brian Langrin and the Bank of Jamaica.

A hearing is scheduled for October 7.

The applicants want the court to declare the policy illegal, irrational, null and void, quash the decision and stop its implementation. They are also seeking costs.

Their central argument is not simply that cheques are useful. They contend that BOJ has exceeded the authority given to it under Section 27 of the Bank of Jamaica Act.

They also rely on section 13(3)(h) of Jamaica’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, arguing that favouring people able or willing to transact electronically over people who continue to rely on cheques amounts to inequitable treatment by a public authority.

Those remain allegations before the court. No court has determined that BOJ acted unlawfully.

What the law says

BOJ unquestionably has significant powers over Jamaica’s payment system.

Section 27 of the Bank of Jamaica Act gives the central bank powers over the national payment system for the purpose of preventing or controlling systemic risk. BOJ may issue directions, standards and guidelines and conduct audits and inspections.

The Payment Clearing and Settlement Act 2010 also charges BOJ with regulating, supervising and monitoring clearing and settlement systems.

The question now being raised is narrower and potentially important: does the power to regulate a payment system also include the power effectively to retire one of Jamaica’s oldest payment instruments?

That is the argument the Supreme Court is being asked to examine.

This started decades ago

The disappearance of the cheque did not begin in 2026.

Jamaica’s banking system has been moving towards electronic payments for nearly three decades.

MultiLink, the shared banking network that allows customers to make payments through ABMs and point-of-sale terminals, began operating in June 1997.

The Automated Clearing House, or ACH, followed in October 2002. It enabled banks to clear cheques, direct debits and electronic credits through a national system rather than relying entirely on older manual arrangements.

But Jamaica was still a cheque-heavy economy.

In 2005, some 10.8 million cheques worth J$1.96 trillion passed through the ACH alone. Another J$1.792 trillion in proprietary cheques, meaning cheques deposited or cashed at the bank on which they were drawn, was processed that year.

Total cheque payments amounted to approximately J$3.752 trillion.

That same year BOJ formally embarked on a comprehensive programme to modernise Jamaica’s payment and settlement infrastructure. Its stated objectives were to strengthen the legal framework, reduce inefficiencies and minimise systemic risk. A National Payments Council was also established to bring banks, regulators, government and other stakeholders into the reform process.

In 2006, BOJ published its broader vision for a modern National Payments System, arguing that Jamaica needed a coordinated national architecture rather than separate institutions modernising independently.

The cheque’s eventual decline was already being engineered.

The electronic motorway

The decisive technological change came in February 2009, when BOJ launched JamClear Real Time Gross Settlement, or RTGS.

RTGS was designed for large-value and time-critical payments. Today it is specifically used for transactions of J$1 million or more.

Unlike a cheque, which enters a clearing process before money is finally settled, RTGS settles individual payments electronically in real time through accounts held at BOJ. Once completed, payments are final and irrevocable.

In May 2009, Jamaica also introduced the JamClear Central Securities Depository for electronic settlement and recording of Government of Jamaica and BOJ securities.

By 2010, RTGS had already processed 133,584 transactions worth about J$11 trillion.

Parliament then reinforced the new architecture.

The Government Securities Dematerialisation Act was passed in February 2010, while the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act was passed in December 2010, strengthening BOJ’s oversight of the national payment system.

Jamaica was steadily replacing paper with electronic settlement.

Then came digital money

The transformation accelerated again two decades into the century.

On August 9, 2021, BOJ minted Jamaica’s first batch of central bank digital currency. The pilot involved J$230 million in digital currency intended for deposit-taking institutions and authorised payment providers.

The currency was subsequently named JAM-DEX, short for Jamaica Digital Exchange.

On June 14, 2022, amendments to the Bank of Jamaica Act were passed making JAM-DEX legal tender and establishing BOJ as the sole issuer of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency.

In little more than 20 years Jamaica had moved from overwhelmingly paper-based settlement towards internet banking, cards, electronic transfers, RTGS, mobile wallets and central-bank digital currency.

The cheque survived, but its dominance did not.

The numbers tell the story

By 2025, only 2.4 million cheques were processed through the ACH, with a total value of J$444 billion.

Compared with 2024, cheque volume fell 12.6 per cent, or 347,075 cheques, while their total value dropped 6.9 per cent, equivalent to J$33 billion.

The average ACH cheque was worth J$184,117.47, up 6.5 per cent from J$172,910.83 in 2024.

There were also 2.7 million proprietary cheques worth J$453.4 billion processed within the institutions on which they were drawn.

Electronic payments were moving in the opposite direction.

During 2025, the ACH processed 14.6 million direct debit and credit transactions worth J$1.2 trillion. Volumes increased 6 per cent, while their value jumped 17.4 per cent.

Point-of-sale transactions reached 34.4 million, an increase of 7.8 per cent, with their value rising 9 per cent, or J$20.9 billion, to J$252 billion.

In other words, Jamaicans have already been voting with their bank accounts.

Why J$1 million?

There is also logic behind the first threshold.

BOJ says the ACH is principally a retail system operating on a deferred net settlement basis, while RTGS exists for large and time-critical transactions.

The J$1 million dividing line is therefore not arbitrary. BOJ’s payment architecture already treats payments at or above that level differently because of the potential systemic risk created by large transactions sitting inside a deferred clearing system.

Banks are consequently directing customers making payments of J$1 million or more towards RTGS and other electronic channels.

Government is leaving too

The change extends beyond commercial banks.

Tax Administration Jamaica has joined the transition and intends to stop accepting and issuing cheques by March 2028.

Its withdrawal also began on September 1, including government cheques and manager’s cheques valued at J$1 million or more.

That makes the transition difficult to dismiss as merely a change in how individual banks choose to operate.

It is becoming a restructuring of how Jamaica moves money.

What could be lost

Yet the resistance should not simply be dismissed as fear of technology.

Cheques provide something particularly important to businesses, churches, charities, strata corporations and other organisations: visible financial control.

A cheque can require two authorised signatures before one dollar leaves an account.

An elderly customer can understand a cheque book without understanding online banking.

A small organisation can issue payments without giving employees broad digital access to its bank account.

Electronic banking can replicate many of those controls, but institutions must actually have the systems, knowledge and access to use them.

That is where the social argument collides with the technological one.

The bigger question

The history suggests that the cheque’s decline was probably inevitable.

In 2005 Jamaica processed 10.8 million ACH cheques. Twenty years later that number had collapsed to 2.4 million, while electronic payments were expanding rapidly.

BOJ has spent more than two decades building the infrastructure intended to replace paper.

But technological inevitability and legal authority are different questions.

The Supreme Court is not being asked whether electronic transfers are faster than cheques.

It is being asked to consider who has the authority to decide when an established means of payment has reached the end of its life.

And after more than 20 years of payment-system reform, that may prove to be the most important question of all.