Although many of us weekly, or even more often, use an automatic teller machine, very little has yet been published in England on electronic means of making payments. This book deals with the use in banking of electronic payments. It is an edited collection of papers given at the annual residential seminar held jointly by the Institute of Bankers and the Centre for Commercial Law Studies from Queen Mary College, University of London. The central concern of all the contributors to the book is to identify bankers’ liability for payments made by electronics means.

It is easy to discern the origin of each contribution to the book, as one from the banking or legal side of the conference. Those from the banking side provide descriptive accounts of how the inter-bank payment and clearing systems work. The two main electronic systems in use, by Bankers Automated Clearing Services (BACS) and Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS), are given special attention, with flow diagrams and information about the growth in volume of payments passing through the systems. The most interesting contribution of this type describes the difficulties in establishing the electronic presentation and transfer of shipping documents under a system appropriately called “SeaDocs” (Sea