Borrowers from Non Banking Financial Companies (NBFC) now have time till 31 March 2013 to replace their old system bank cheques with new ones with added security features for their equated monthly instalment (EMI) payments, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) said in a circular.

The banking regulator said that the deadline will be extended up to the end of March for NBFCs “to ensure withdrawal of Non-CTS 2010 Standard compliant cheques and replace them with CTS-2010 Standard compliant cheques”.

Cheque Truncation System (CTS) 2010, with a set of minimum security features will ensure uniformity across all cheque forms issued by banks in the country and also help presenting banks while scrutinising and recognising cheques of drawee banks in an image-based processing scenario, RBI had said earlier.

In a move to standardize and enhance security features on cheque leaflets, the apex bank had asked all banks to migrate to ‘CTS-2010´ standard cheques by 31 December.

NBFCs accepting cheque payments for future instalments from their customers were asked to get it replaced with the new standard cheques. (PTI)