The banking industry has denied that customers still face unacceptable delays in processing transactions, after criticism from Donald Cruickshank, author of a Treasury-commissioned report into the sector.
Mr Cruickshank said last week little or no progress had been made in improving payment systems in the five years since his report was published.
Paul Smee, chief executive of Apacs, the payments association, said: "We are surprised at Donald Cruickshank's intervention. Significant progress has been made to a number of the concerns raised."
The report, published in March 2000, identified "profound competition problems and inefficiencies" in the market for money transmission services, a series of unregulated networks mostly controlled by the big banks. For customers, this meant long transaction-processing times, such as the three to five days it routinely takes to clear a cheque, or the complicated and time-consuming task of switching bank accounts.
"We believe a significant amount of change has already happened in the industry," said Mike Rogers, managing director of retail banking at Barclays. "Barclays is still the only bank to offer same-day value on cheques cleared under ?1,000 for the majority of personal customers."
Barclays said customers still bore the risk of the cheque bouncing until five days had passed while it went through the clearing system.
The government initially accepted Mr Cruickshank's recommendations to pass new legislation and establish a regulator to improve payments system pricing and access, but last year opted instead to set up a taskforce, led by the Office of Fair Trading, which had a four- year mandate.
"We have no power [to force change on the banks] because we are not acting under any statute," said Gover James, head of the payment systems team at the OFT. "We were set up by the Treasury to bring about collaborative change."
The taskforce, made up of one civil servant, 11 banking representatives and four consumer representatives, is expected to report on proposals to improve clearing of electronic transfers in April, after which an industry implementation group will have six months to come up with its preferred method of delivering change and a timetable.
Mr Smee said there had been several significant changes in payments systems since the Cruickshank report, including opening up cheque processing to third-party processors and reducing the time taken to transfer bank accounts from five to three days.
"But any project on payments is complex and has to deliver a service which is as reliable and secure as the current one," he said. "Those factors are more important to consumers and the economy than speed."
Before 2000, according to HBOS, the bank, about 350,000 people switched their current accounts each year. This figure had now in-creased to about 950,000.
