Are there any plans to put in place a cross-border cheque clearing system?
No. Cheques were never intended to be used as cross-border payment instruments, the legislation governing cheques differ from country to country, and it has been specifically excluded from EU harmonisation applied to electronic payment instruments (the Payment Services Directive) because of the low and reducing volume of cheque usage. Also cheque design (account details, print font and size, inks used, paper quality) is different in every country, which means that a cheque printed to one country’s standard cannot be processed by the systems of another country. This is another reason for there bing no cross-border cheque clearing system – you would need to have a standardised cheque and attempting to produce one is impractical as the demand simply does not exist.
