Over one million Barclays’ Premier Account holders will be able to pay in a cheque by taking a photo of it on their smartphone and sending them electronically, the bank has announced.

The imaging technology, currently working on iPhones only, would particularly benefit those customers who don’t have the time to visit branches or ATMs to carry out their transactions, Barclays said.

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The move comes just a few days after Barclays announced the launch of Barclays Video Banking providing a face-to-face service for its wealth, business and mortgage customers.

The lender revealed that up to £300m worth of UK cheques a year are never paid in, compared with £840bn deposited.

A Premier Account is available and offered to customers who earn £75,000 or more. UK Corporate clients will be also soon trialling the cheque imaging technology as, according to the bank, they still put through around 46m cheques each year, with a value in excess of £100bn.

Ashok Vaswani, Barclays’ Personal and Corporate Banking chief executive, said: "Our customers really appreciate the cheque imaging service, and so we are delighted to be extending the service to a million more people in time for Christmas as well as looking to roll this out to our corporate clients.

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"Innovations like this are all about giving our customers more choice, saving them time and money and ensuring they can do their banking where and when it suits them best."

The technology, which was available to retail customers since June 2014, has received positive feedback, with 90% of users saying that it enabled them to do ‘everything they wanted’, Barclays also reported.

Barclays said it will continue to work on the imaging technology throughout 2015, extending the pilot to Android based smartphones as well.

The bank will also be looking to introduce the technology to charities as 66% of their donations come in via cheques.