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Cheque print check & AR operators

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Jo Francis tracks down the solutions to your technical troubles

Q I was wondering if you might be able to give me the benefit of your knowledge with respect to the legalities and regulatory restrictions of printing cheques. My company has a customer who has asked us to submit a quotation for their own cheque/remittance forms. These comprise of an A4 sheet with a standard layout remittance (Sage accounting or similar) perforated off 100mm from the bottom, the lower part of which forms the cheque. However, I am a little concerned because: one, I am not clear about the legalities of a 'run-of-the-mill' commercial printer being allowed to produce cheques; two, the material it has previously been printed on has a regularly repeated watermark of a padlock and catch in the paper. Any help or advice you could offer would be very much appreciated.
'JS', via email

A To be able to print cheques you have to be an accredited printer. As far as I know this includes everything from chequebooks to cheque remittance forms, because the cheque element has to include special MICR (magnetic
ink character recognition) printing so the cheques can be read automatically, among other things. And cheques are of course a type of security print with all the standards and strictures that go along with that, so cheque printers are required to be certified to ISO 27001. Cheque production used to be an APACS-accredited thing, but APACS has changed its name just to confuse things. It now comes under the UK Payments Administration umbrella (www.ukpayments.org.uk). You can find out more here: www.chequeandcredit.co.uk/cpas where there's a downloadable list of accredited printers. Hope this helps.

AR update
Following the request for suppliers of augmented reality services a few weeks back (Help Line, 13 August), I must thank Scott Pearce at Datum CP in Hatfield for getting in touch with a further suggestion. Scott "highly recommends" the aptly-named Crossplatform, based in London (www.crossplatform.tv, 020 7291 8145). The company counts publishers such as IPC Media and Future among its clients, along with media owner JCDecaux and big brands including Nokia and Intel. Many thanks for the information, Scott, my list of suppliers in this space has now doubled in size.

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