fraud. It was therefore announced by the UK Payments Council in July 2011 that the cheque would not be eliminated. 432 million inter-bank cheques and credit-items worth £472,000,000,000 were processed in the United Kingdom in 2016 according to Payments UK. In 2017, 405 million cheques worth £356 billion were used for payments and acquiring cash, an average of 1.2 million cheques per day, with more than 10 million being cleared in Northern Ireland alone. The Cheque and Credit Clearing Company noted that cheques continue to be highly valued for paying tradesmen and utility bills, and play a vital role in business, clubs and societies sectors, with nine in 10 business saying that they received or made payment by cheque on a monthly basis. In June 2014, following a successful trial in the UK by Barclays, the UK government gave the go-ahead for a cheque truncation system, allowing people to pay in a cheque by taking a photo of it, rather than physically depositing the paper cheque at a bank. United States In the United States, cheques are referred to as checks and are governed by Article 3 of the Uniform Commercial Code, under the rubric of negotiable instruments. An order check—the most common form in the US—is payable only to the named payee or endorsee, as it usually contains the language "Pay to the order of (name)". A bearer check is payable to anyone who is in possession of the document: this would be the case if the cheque does not name a payee, or is payable to "bearer" or to "cash" or "to the order of cash", or if the cheque is payable to someone who is not a person or legal entity, for example if the payee line is marked "Happy Birthday". A counter check is one that a bank issues to an account holder in person. This is typically done for customers who have opened a new account or have run out of personalized cheques. It may lack the usual security features. In the US, the terminology for a cheque historically varied with the type of financial institution on which it is drawn. In the case of a savings and loan association it was a negotiable order of withdrawal (compare Negotiable Order of Withdrawal account); if a credit union it was a share draft. "Checks" were associated with chartered commercial banks. However, common usage has increasingly conformed