Bhubaneswar: The Reserve Bank Of India (RBI) has decided to extend the Cheque Truncation System (CTS) across banks in the country.
Earlier, the RBI had announced pan-India coverage of CTS by bringing all branches of banks in the country under an image-based CTS clearing mechanism.
As per the latest notification, the CTS is in use since 2010 and presently covers around 1, 50,000 branches. All the erstwhile 1219 non-CTS clearing houses (ECCS centers) have been migrated to CTS effective September 2020.
“It is, however, seen that there are branches of banks that are outside any formal clearing arrangement and their customers face hardships due to the longer time taken and cost involved in collection of cheques presented by them,” said RBI in a statement.
As per the statement, it has been decided to extend CTS across all bank branches in the country to leverage the availability of CTS and provide a uniform customer experience irrespective of location of her/his bank branch.
“To facilitate this, banks shall have to ensure that all their branches participate in image-based CTS under respective grids by September 30, 2021. They are free to adopt a model of their choice, like deploying suitable infrastructure in every branch or following a hub & spoke model, and concerned banks shall coordinate with the respective Regional Offices of RBI to operationalize this,” the statement added.
The RBI has also directed banks to share the roadmap to achieve pan-India coverage of CTS and submit a status report before April 30, 2021.