SIR.-As a bank clerk myself, I cannot help feeling that
Katharine Whitehorn and Sir Anthony Wagner are being rather unreasonable about the decision of some banks to discontinue the practice of specifying the names of payees on statements. If one wishes to see whether a particular cheque has been presented it is surely the work of a few seconds to look up the number on the counterfoil and to search for it on the statement. On the other hand, if one merely wishes to know which cheques are still outstanding it is much easier to note which serial numbers are missing from the statement, if necessary consulting the cheque-book stubs to find the name of the payee, rather than to try to remember the names of all the people to whom one has made payments during the preceding weeks. As a result of the vast increase in business in recent years combined with a shortage of trained staff, it has become imperative for the banks to streamline their business methods in order to continue to provide the many strvices which customers have come to expect. The time which was previously devoted to typing long and often illegible names on statements can now be used to more advantage in other ways.
A further point is that, in the larger branches at least, fully automatic machines will eventually do the work which is at present done partly by hand. Although machines have been devised which can distinguish cheque numbers, I suspect that it will be a long time before we have machines which can read the customers' handwriting.
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