Will the South African counterparts follow suit?

ALEC HOGG: Technology does go forward in many areas, and one area that has been voted on yesterday by the British banks was that they are going to do away with cheques by 2018. Cheques have been around for 300 years, and still four million of them are being written every day in that country, even though the usage has dropped by two-thirds since 1990. Here in South Africa Louis von Zeuner is the deputy chief executive of Absa. Louis, I suppose you can give us some insight. Have you also seen cheque usage in our country fall?

LOUIS VON ZEUNER: Hi, Alec. No, we definitely did - reducing by anything between 10 and 20%, we think, this annum. And again, from our perspective from about 400 000 customers that really actively use the cheque as official payment mechanism. So I guess the same level of changes. But, you know, as the UK guys have said, they are talking about stopping cheques in 2016 and 2018, so quite some time to go, and I think quite a lot of changes and debate that will still take place up to then.

ALEC HOGG: Louis, would South African banks follow the lead?

LOUIS VON ZEUNER: Well, you know, I think it's quite important that we look at some of the prerequisites for that change. One of the areas for us is one needs to look at the digital divide in South Africa; you need to look at the alternative that you can make available for customers. You surely saw a lot of the banks - we took the lead by going to cash-send payments, where the beneficiary need not have a bank account. He can go to an ATM. So I don't think we should take the lead. I think what we will have to do is educate customers, look at innovation, alternative propositions to customers, make sure that we look at the development of electronic banking so that if the time comes - and that's not a decision that you can take in isolation, really, it's not a one-bank decision - there are adequate alternatives for the consumer and for business. And I think that's going to take quite some time.

ALEC HOGG: Louis von Zeuner is the deputy chief executive of Absa. Both Investec and Capitec banks, though, are doing terribly well, and they don't issue cheques, David Shapiro. So there is an alternative. Do you still write a cheque?

DAVID SHAPIRO: No.

ALEC HOGG: I'm a client of Investec. I only need a cheque once a year, to pay the licence on my car.

DAVID SHAPIRO: In fact, that's all I do. That's the only time I ever have to write a cheque. They haven't got an electronic...

ALEC HOGG: Once the licence department updates, we won't have to worry about that, either.

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