Traveller's cheque

Common card · No. 206790

A traveller's cheque is a medium of exchange that can be used in place of the currency of a country. Each cheque is denominated in a preprinted fixed, round, amount of one of a number of major world currencies; it has two panels for a signature. The purchaser signs one panel of each cheque on receiving it; to use it, it is signed on the second panel and dated in the presence of the payee, who accepts it if the signatures match. It can then be deposited into a bank account in the same way as a normal cheque; payment was guaranteed if the signatures matched, even if a cheque had been used fraudulently, for example stolen, encouraging merchants to accept them routinely. While it was possible for the issuer to go out of business, invalidating cheques, most issuers were large, stable businesses. Traveller's cheques were widely used from the 1850s to the 1990s by people travelling in foreign countries instead of cash, mainly before the introduction of payment cards and later electronic methods...

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