The printers, supplied by Tall Group subsidiary Checkprint, both HP Laserjet Pro M402s approved for use with MICR-26X toner, were installed in March 2022.

The installation has enabled Stepchange, which issues around 55,000 charity cheques each year and 10,000 voluntary arrangement cheques, to benefit from a number of new security features and speed up production of the cheques.

Glen Tillotson, regulatory finance manager at Stepchange, said: “Prior to working with the Tall Group, many of our processes were very manual and laborious for our team.

“By introducing these innovative printing and distribution solutions, we are able to modernise our cheque processing, allowing our team to spend their valuable time working on other tasks, while also reducing the risk of fraudulent action against the charity.”

The new machines’ capabilities include the application of bank-recommended image survivable features (ISFs) - computer scannable text or image.

Likewise, on one of the printers, Stephchange’s charity cheques have a unique coded number added. On the other, the Tall Group’s UCNPlus cheque fraud protection technology is applied to the voluntary arrangement cheques.

Under the latter, an encrypted QR code is printed on the face of the cheque, allowing banks to verify the cheque’s authenticity in an automated process.

Martin Ruda, group managing director of the Tall Group, said: “We are delighted to partner with charities like StepChange to streamline its payment operations and bring cost and time efficiencies into their existing internal processes.”

Both printers have been Smithers/Pay.UK approved.