While there is a variety of non-cash payment instruments, cheques are the most commonly
used in Canada. Cheques transfer deposit balances between individual accounts held either in a
single deposit-taking institution or in different deposit-taking institutions. They are typically used
as a payment instrument in medium-to-large size transactions. As shown in Tables 1 and 2, while
cheques account for around 50 percent of the volume of non-cash payments, this represents about
98 percent of the total value of these transactions