CIBC Caribbean told its Jamaican customers this week that cheques of one million dollars or more, manager's cheques included, will no longer be issued or accepted from September 1. The bank is not acting alone. Scotiabank Jamaica and First Global Bank set the same deadline for the same date, and the change is a joint move by the Jamaica Bankers Association to break the country's dependence on paper cheques. Under the industry's own published timetable, the threshold drops again in March 2027, drops a third time in September 2027, and the cheque itself, at any value, stops existing in Jamaica on 1 March 2028.
The declared reason is cost and convenience. Cheques are slow to clear, expensive to process, and increasingly rare outside large one-off payments. The real story sits one layer under that. Jamaica is retiring the one payment instrument that, almost by accident, gave banks days to catch fraud before money actually moved. Every cheque that clears passes through a window of a day or two in which a bank can flag an irregular signature, an inflated amount, or a forged instrument and stop it before the funds settle. Real Time Gross Settlement, the system Jamaica's banks are pushing customers toward instead, has no such window. Money that leaves an account under RTGS is, in practice, gone the moment it leaves.
That trade lands on top of a banking sector where fraud is already climbing fast, and on a population where close to three in ten adults still do not have full access to a bank account. Both are reasons the Bank of Jamaica is right to warn that artificial intelligence will shape how the next round of financial crime plays out. The question this deadline raises is not whether Jamaica should eliminate the cheque. It is whether the country builds the AI fraud defence the new system requires before March 2028 arrives, or after the losses show up in the next Financial Stability Report.
The Timeline Jamaica's Banks Have Set
On 16 July, CIBC Caribbean confirmed the September 1 cutoff to its Jamaican customers, describing it as part of a joint industry initiative with the Jamaica Bankers Association to reduce cheque usage and accelerate the shift to electronic payments. It follows identical announcements from Scotiabank Jamaica and First Global Bank, meaning three of the country's largest retail banks now share one deadline. Customers making transactions at or above the threshold are being directed to Real Time Gross Settlement through online banking and mobile apps.
The schedule that follows is specific and already public. From September 1, 2026, cheques of one million Jamaican dollars or more stop moving through CIBC, Scotiabank, and First Global. The threshold falls to five hundred thousand dollars in March 2027. It falls again to one hundred thousand dollars in September 2027. On 1 March 2028, the cheque is gone entirely, regardless of amount, replaced across the board by RTGS transfers.
Nineteen months separate today from that final date. That is not a long runway for a country to rebuild the fraud controls built into an instrument it has used for generations, especially when the instrument replacing it settles in real time and offers no equivalent to a bounced cheque.
Cheques Were an Accidental Fraud Control
Jamaica's banking sector is not migrating away from cheques into a quiet, low-crime environment. It is migrating into one where fraud has already been rising for years. The Bank of Jamaica's Financial Stability Report for 2024 recorded internet banking scams growing almost ninefold since 2019, and found that cheque fraud itself had surged to its highest level in five years, precisely because banks had spent that period closing the loopholes criminals had been using against payment cards. Debit and credit card fraud still accounts for the majority of cases, around 56 percent, but the direction of travel is unmistakable. Total fraud reported across the banking sector reached J$1.73 billion for the year to March 2023, almost double the pre-pandemic peak recorded in 2019.
That pattern, closing one channel and watching fraud reappear in another, is exactly what should worry anyone reading the cheque phase-out schedule closely. Every time a Jamaican bank tightens controls on cards, fraud does not disappear. It moves to whichever channel still has a gap. Cheques are the next channel to close, and RTGS transfers, the channel absorbing that volume, remove the one structural advantage cheques offered a defrauded customer: time. A cheque can be stopped after it is written and before it clears. An RTGS transfer authorised by a customer, even one authorised because a scammer impersonated a supplier or a bank officer, generally cannot be recalled once it settles.
A Warning From Elsewhere
The United Kingdom lived through this exact transition when it built Faster Payments, its own real-time transfer rail, more than a decade ago. Authorised Push Payment fraud, where a criminal tricks a customer or a business into sending a real-time transfer directly rather than stealing card details, became the fastest-growing category of payment fraud in the country, running into hundreds of millions of pounds in losses a year according to the UK's Payment Systems Regulator. Jamaica is walking the same road several years behind, with the advantage of already knowing exactly what went wrong the first time.
The Financial Inclusion Problem Hiding Inside the Deadline
The other complication is who still depends on physical instruments to move money. Jamaica's own National Financial Inclusion Demand-Side Study found that 77.2 percent of adults held an account at a formal financial institution in 2023, meaning 22.8 percent, close to a quarter of the adult population, did not. A further 6.3 percent were classified as underbanked, holding an account but relying on it for little more than receiving deposits. Combined, close to three in ten Jamaican adults sit outside full financial inclusion.
The gap is not evenly spread. Upper income Jamaicans were banked at 95.6 percent, middle income at 92 percent. Working class Jamaicans fell to 79.8 percent, and lower income Jamaicans to just 59.6 percent. Most of the unbanked live in rural parishes, further from a branch, more likely to be paid in cash, and more likely to have relied on cheques or money orders for the larger transactions a digital-only system now assumes everyone can complete on a phone.
The Bank of Jamaica is not ignoring this. In February 2026 it launched the second phase of its National Financial Inclusion Strategy, built around access, education, and trust. But a payments strategy and a financial inclusion strategy are, at the moment, running on separate tracks inside the same institution. The cheque phase-out is a payments decision. The unbanked population it will push toward RTGS, mobile banking, or informal cash arrangements is a financial inclusion problem. Closing that gap before 2028, not after, is where AI has the clearest opening.
Four Ways AI Can Close the Gap Cheques Leave Behind
None of what follows is speculative technology. Every application below is already running in production at banks and payment processors outside the Caribbean. The question for Jamaica is deployment speed, not invention.
1. Screening the Payment Before It Settles, Not After
A cheque gave a bank a day or two to look at a transaction before money moved. RTGS gives it milliseconds. The only way to recover an equivalent margin of safety is to move the fraud check to the moment before authorisation rather than after settlement. AI-based transaction scoring, trained on account behaviour, transfer size, recipient history, and device and location signals, can flag a transfer as high-risk in the time it takes a customer to press confirm, holding it for a manual check or a one-time verification call rather than letting it clear instantly. Visa, Mastercard, and the major real-time payment schemes already run this kind of scoring by default. Jamaica's banks need the equivalent built into RTGS transfers specifically, not bolted onto the card network alone.
2. Catching the Supplier Impersonation Scam Before the Money Moves
The specific fraud pattern that grew fastest under the UK's Faster Payments system, a scammer posing as a supplier, a landlord, or a bank compliance officer and instructing a real transfer, depends on convincing a real customer to authorise a real payment. Card fraud detection cannot catch this, because a customer, not a stolen card, initiates the transfer. What catches it is AI trained specifically on the language and behaviour of these scams: unusual last-minute changes to bank account details on an invoice, pressure to move a payment the same day, requests that arrive by email rather than through a verified channel. Banks in Britain and Australia have built exactly this kind of detection into their business banking platforms over the past five years. Jamaican banks moving businesses off manager's cheques and onto RTGS this September are the ones most exposed to this fraud pattern first.
3. Bringing the Unbanked Into a Digital System Without a Branch Visit
Jamaica's 22.8 percent unbanked rate, concentrated among lower income and rural residents, is precisely the population a cheque-free system risks leaving furthest behind. Traditional bank onboarding requires documents, a branch visit, and often a credit history that a rural, cash-paid worker does not have. AI-driven onboarding, already used by mobile money operators across Africa and by fintech lenders in Latin America, builds a usable risk and identity profile from alternative data: mobile money transaction history, utility payment records, and government ID verification done through a phone camera rather than a branch counter. This is the technology that lets the Bank of Jamaica's access pillar and its payments strategy actually converge, instead of running past each other.
4. Giving the Regulator Eyes On a Faster System
A payments system that settles in real time needs supervision that runs in real time too. The Bank of Jamaica currently reviews fraud patterns largely through periodic reporting, the same cadence that produces a Financial Stability Report once a year. AI-based supervisory analytics, already used by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of England to monitor payment system data as it is generated rather than after the fact, would let the BOJ see a spike in a specific fraud pattern within days of it starting, not in the next annual report. That capability matters more, not less, once cheques and their built-in delay disappear from the system entirely.
What Has to Happen Before March 2028
The commercial banks driving this phase-out control the timeline, and they should use the months remaining to build the AI fraud layer alongside the RTGS migration rather than after complaints start arriving. Waiting until the hundred-thousand-dollar threshold hits in September 2027, when the volume of smaller, more numerous transfers explodes, is waiting until the fraud pattern is already established and expensive to unwind.
The Bank of Jamaica has the more structural role. Its Guidelines for Electronic Retail Payment Services have not been revised since 2018, before real-time payment fraud at this scale was a mainstream concern anywhere in the world, let alone in Jamaica. Updating them to require AI-based transaction screening as a condition of operating an RTGS channel, rather than leaving each bank to set its own standard, would close the gap between what the country's fraud data already shows and what its payment rules currently require.
The National Financial Inclusion Strategy needs an explicit line connecting it to the cheque phase-out, not two initiatives that happen to share a regulator. A rural, lower income Jamaican who currently uses a cheque or a money order for an occasional large payment should have an AI-assisted digital alternative in place before the paper option disappears, not a gap where cash and informal arrangements are the only choice left. Jamaica set a specific, public deadline for killing the cheque. The country now has a specific, calculable window to build what has to replace not just the cheque, but the fraud control that came with it for free.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did CIBC Caribbean just announce about cheques in Jamaica?
On 16 July 2026, CIBC Caribbean told its Jamaican customers it will stop issuing and accepting cheques, including manager's cheques, valued at one million Jamaican dollars or more from September 1, 2026. The bank described the move as part of a joint industry initiative with the Jamaica Bankers Association to reduce cheque usage and accelerate the shift to electronic payments. CIBC is directing affected customers to Real Time Gross Settlement through its online banking platform and mobile app. Scotiabank Jamaica and First Global Bank had already announced identical restrictions from the same date, meaning three of Jamaica's largest retail banks now share one deadline.
What is the full timeline for Jamaica to eliminate cheques entirely?
The Jamaica Bankers Association's industry-wide timetable runs in four stages. From September 1, 2026, cheques of one million Jamaican dollars or more stop moving through the participating banks. The threshold falls to five hundred thousand dollars in March 2027, then to one hundred thousand dollars in September 2027. On 1 March 2028, cheques are discontinued entirely, at any value, replaced across the board by electronic transfers made through Real Time Gross Settlement.
Why is cheque fraud rising in Jamaica right now?
The Bank of Jamaica's Financial Stability Report for 2024 recorded cheque fraud surging to its highest level in five years, at the same time internet banking scams grew almost ninefold since 2019. The pattern is consistent with what happens whenever one fraud channel is tightened: as banks closed loopholes criminals had used against debit and credit cards, which still account for around 56 percent of reported fraud cases, criminal activity shifted toward cheques. Total fraud reported across Jamaica's banking sector reached J$1.73 billion for the year to March 2023, almost double the pre-pandemic peak recorded in 2019.
Why does moving from cheques to instant transfers create a new fraud risk?
A cheque takes a day or two to clear, and that delay gives a bank a window to catch a forged signature, an altered amount, or a fraudulent instrument before the money actually moves. Real Time Gross Settlement, the system replacing cheques in Jamaica, has no equivalent window: funds generally settle within seconds and cannot be recalled once they do. The United Kingdom saw the same shift produce a specific consequence when it built its own real-time transfer rail, Faster Payments, over a decade ago. Authorised Push Payment fraud, where a scammer impersonates a supplier or a bank officer to convince a customer to authorise a real transfer directly, became the fastest-growing category of payment fraud in the country, running into hundreds of millions of pounds in annual losses according to the UK's Payment Systems Regulator.
How many Jamaicans are unbanked, and why does that matter for this transition?
The Bank of Jamaica's National Financial Inclusion Demand-Side Study found that 77.2 percent of Jamaican adults held an account at a formal financial institution in 2023, meaning 22.8 percent did not. A further 6.3 percent were classified as underbanked. Together, close to three in ten adults sit outside full financial inclusion, and the gap is sharply uneven by income: 95.6 percent of upper income Jamaicans were banked against just 59.6 percent of lower income Jamaicans, with most of the unbanked concentrated in rural parishes. Those are the Jamaicans most likely to have relied on cheques or money orders for larger occasional payments, and most at risk of being pushed toward informal cash arrangements once the paper option disappears.
What specific AI tools can Jamaican banks deploy to manage this fraud risk?
Four applications are already running in production elsewhere and are directly transferable to Jamaica's transition. Pre-authorisation transaction scoring flags a high-risk transfer using account behaviour, transfer size, and recipient history before it settles, rather than after. Business email compromise detection, trained on the language patterns of supplier and bank-officer impersonation scams, catches the specific fraud type that grew fastest under the UK's Faster Payments system. Alternative-data onboarding, already used by mobile money operators and fintech lenders elsewhere, brings unbanked and rural Jamaicans into the digital system using mobile transaction history and utility payment records rather than a branch visit and formal credit history. And real-time supervisory analytics, of the kind used by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the Bank of England, would let the Bank of Jamaica see a fraud spike within days rather than in the next annual report.
Has this exact problem happened before in another country?
Yes. The United Kingdom's move to real-time payments through Faster Payments produced Authorised Push Payment fraud as its dominant new fraud category, because the same instant, irrevocable settlement that makes real-time transfers convenient also removes the delay that let banks intercept fraud after a customer had already been deceived into authorising it. The UK's Payment Systems Regulator has tracked hundreds of millions of pounds in annual losses from this category since. Jamaica is making a comparable structural change to its payment system, cheques for RTGS, at a time when its own fraud data already shows criminal activity migrating to whichever channel has the least real-time monitoring.
What should the Bank of Jamaica do before the March 2028 deadline?
Three things matter most. The Bank of Jamaica's Guidelines for Electronic Retail Payment Services have not been revised since 2018 and should be updated to require AI-based transaction screening as a condition of operating an RTGS channel, rather than leaving the standard to each bank individually. The commercial banks driving the phase-out should build that AI fraud layer alongside the RTGS migration now, well before the September 2027 threshold pushes a much larger volume of smaller transfers onto the system. And the Bank of Jamaica's National Financial Inclusion Strategy, launched in February 2026 around access, education, and trust, needs an explicit link to the cheque phase-out, so unbanked and rural Jamaicans have an AI-assisted digital alternative in place before the paper option they currently rely on disappears.