Electronic cheque clearing house membership reaches 50

Membership of Nepal Clearing House Ltd (NCHL) — that clears cheques electronically — reached 50 today.
"The clearing house has Nepal Rastra Bank, all 32 commercial banks, 11 development banks, and six finance companies as its members,” according to chief executive of NCHL Neelesh Pradhan.
“Some more financial institutions are in the final stages of joining the clearing house,” he said, adding that after having all the commercial banks within the NCHL-Electronic Cheque Clearing network, many of the development banks and finance companies are now gearing up to join the clearing house for providing electronic cheque clearing services to their customers.
Customers now can deposit their cheques — before 12:00 noon at the member banks and financial institutions — which are cleared and settled on the same day by late afternoon.
The cheques deposited after 12:00 noon are cleared and settled the following day, according to the clearing house that is providing Electronic Cheque Clearing service on Fridays too, on which the cheques deposited between 10:00 to 11:00 in the morning will be cleared and settled by noon the same day.
“The time to deposit cheques will be extended till 14:00 afternoon after the introduction of the magnetic ink character reader (MICR) cheques with the necessary security features by the member banks and financial institutions,” Pradhan added.
The clearing house started its operation with the clearing of foreign currency denominated cheques from February 3, and introduced clearing of Nepali rupee denominated cheques from April 9. “Since then, it has been clearing 7,850 cheques on an average per business day,” he said, adding that member banks and financial institutions are currently providing NCHL-ECC services from their branches within Kathmandu valley and many of them are now preparing to extend the service outside the valley.