Meantime, Oftel has set the IA charge to include a deduction for the outpayment in the expectation that solutions to the difficulties will have been reached before significant traffic develops.

What's more, it broke new ground in Europe when it adopted Optical Character Recognition for its transfer, inpayment and outpayment transaction documents, making it possible for the first time for utility companies and mail order companies to print their own personalised remittance slips and automate at least part of the complex accounting processes.