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Submission - Acceptance of Cash Payments Review - Age Concern - 23 July 2024

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The inconvenience of not having cash payment systems has only been raised on Government owned or controlled entities (the airport concessions, swimming at Les Quennevais, and car parking). Therefore the idea of asking them to sort out a problem they had created seemed rather bazaar.

Businesses generally were still taking cash despite the banks making it very inconvenient for them to do so. Generally we are against legislation for the sake of legislation as it pushes up costs. If a business has a client base solely aimed at the youth market we would be against forcing them to take cash, and investing in systems in procedures that would never be used.

The fact that apart from Government entities causing problems, and we are against

forcing businesses to take cash needlessly if they don't have customers that use cash, a response from Age Concern seemed less than urgent.

However we recently received the attached correspondence from our bankers which does cause grave concern.

Opening bank accounts for charities is an absolute nightmare and they charge a fortune for handling both cash and cheques.

Our main streams of revenue that requires banking is from the sale of lunches and charity shop income. We encourage our members to pay by card , as it saves us the bank charges, but many members are happier, or can only pay cash.

As you will see our bankers are insisting that we get cash deposits down to only 20% of our banking transactions.

This will, quite frankly, be impossible and if they close our account then Age Concern Jersey can no longer operate.

If there is legislation it should be aimed at the banks, perhaps capping bank handling charges and making it illegal for them to dictate to an account holder how much cash they can pay in.

The younger generations don't need cash, and businesses aimed at this cashless generation should not have the expense and red-tape of administering something not necessary. However consideration should be given to forcing the banks to stop their anti third sector policies and make cash less of a cost organisations helping others, an alien concept to many in Jersey.

This email can be included in the public submission, but not the attachments as these are confidential.

Kind regards,

Ben Shenton

Chairman - Age Concern Jersey