RBS joins Natwest in scrapping the contentious scheme, whereby customers are sent cheques they can use against their credit card account that incur massive interest charges and severe penalty payments.

Nick White, the head of personal finance at price comparison site uSwitch.com, said that the move was “good news” for the industry as a whole and would help to lead credit card providers away from the negative and underhand image they have got for practises such as these.

“We estimate that a total of 144 million cheques have been issued to over 18 million customers, 98 per cent of which were unsolicited,” he said.

“Credit card cheques have long been regarded as one of the key contributors to bad debt,” Mr White continued, adding that the decision would help to combat “the bad debt epidemic, which has been increasingly eating into [banks’] profit margins”.

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