One of the hurdles to eradicating the relic that is Australia's cheques system may be on the way to being dismantled, as electronic transfers take hold in property settlements.Property batches settled on the Reserve Bank of Australia's RITS system had "reached nearly 4,000 per month" by late 2015, Tony Richards, head of payments policy at the RBA told an industry conference yesterday."This trend is expected to continue," he said, explaining that "on average, there are around 40,000 property [settlements] in Australia each month, plus a significant number of refinancings."Richards applauded the "preparatory work [on] electronic conveyancing and settlement ... arranged by Property Exchange Australia."While not going so far as to call for, or predict, the end of the cheque system in Australia, Richards opted to open, and devote a lot of time, to the topic in his talk to the Payments Innovation 2016 Conference in Sydney.Surveying well known themes, Richards pointed to "a long-term decline occurring in the use of all types of cheques - financial institution or bank cheques, personal cheques, and commercial cheques."This decline was accelerating, Richards said. "One can see that by comparing the average decline in the most recent five-year period (13.5 per cent) relative to the previous one (ten per cent)", he said. "Indeed, most recently cheque usage has been declining at a rate of about 16 per cent per annum."The decline in cheque usage is a global phenomenon. All the OECD countries for which consistent payments data are available show declines of 45 per cent or more in per capita usage over 2000 to 2014. In six of those countries, admittedly ones where usage was already quite low, cheques have essentially disappeared. In at least one case - the Netherlands - the system has been closed.But the decline in cheque usage in Australia is a bit larger than the overall decline for OECD economies. So our cheque usage is now quite low compared with most other English-speaking economies.He reminded his audience that in 2012, following a period of consultation, "the Australian Payments Clearing Association concluded that there was 'no immediate need to consider closing the cheque system' and that the future of cheques could be primarily addressed through the operation of market forces."More recently, he said, the Australian Payments Council in 2014 in its Australian Payments Plan, which was released in December 2015 - "included an initiative to manage the transition away from cheques."Taking care with his analysis, Richards said "there is a lot happening in the payments industry at present, so my sense is that it would be premature to have a serious discussion about possibly phasing out cheques before the implementation of the New Payments Platform, which is scheduled to begin operations in late 2017."But it's clear the RBA, the payments industry regulator, expects the curtain to fall on this archaic payment instrument.Richards noted that "there is a lot happening in the payments industry at present, so my sense is that it would be premature to have a serious discussion about possibly