Paymatic (M) Sdn Bhd’s hybrid business e-payment solution, recently launched by Communications and Multimedia Minister Gobind Singh Deo, aims to meet the SME’s customary requirement of paper cheques and allow banks to operate in the e-payment ecosystem.

Paymatic’s managing director Rajasuriya Letchumanan said only the number of interbank cheques processed was available in Bank Negara Malaysia’s (BNM) annual report.

For 2017, the figure reported was 119 million interbank cheques processed, not including the number of cash cheques, house cheques and inter-branch cheques processed.

Rajasuriya said this information should be available in the public domain as the industry deserved to know the number of such cheques processed in the country.

The solution is expected to reduce the cheque processing cost from RM4 per piece currently to an estimated RM0.50. The processing cost of manual cheques is estimated to increase to RM6.80 in 2020.

The UK Payment Council originally planned to abolish the use of cheques in 2018 but was forced to backtrack after opposition from the public.

“Not only the UK, the US has been at the forefront of deploying cheque depositing solutions via mobile, but we at Paymatic have taken this innovation a step further by providing end-to-end hybrid business e-payment solutions,” Rajasuriya told FMT.

Paymatic’s solution will enable cheques to be processed in almost real time in a secure environment via the SME internet banking platform.