A new service which allows people to pay in cheques by taking a photo of them rather than having to go to their bank has been made available to nearly one million more people.

Barclays launched a pilot "cheque imaging" scheme in June 2014 through its mobile banking app, which means that instead of consumers needing to visit the bank to pay in a cheque of up to £500, they can pay it in by taking a photo of it on their smartphone.

The money is then available for withdrawal instantly and the cheque takes a maximum of two working days to clear, if it is deposited by 4pm, rather than the traditional six-day period for clearing a payment by cheque.

Up until now, people have needed an iPhone to use the technology, but Barclays is now making the service available to customers with android phones and iPads.

So far, around 30,000 Barclays customers have signed up to the mobile cheque imaging tool on their iPhones and nearly £750,000 been deposited in this way since the tool was launched a year ago.

Barclays said that nearly one million more customers, including people with android phones and iPads, have now been contacted to invite them to take part in the scheme. It is up to customers to decide whether they want to sign up.

Several businesses have already signed up to the scheme. Barclays said that corporate customers are able to scan and upload cheques using software on their office computers or by logging into a website. They will have immediate access to the funds - but they will need to wait the standard six days to be sure that the cheque will not bounce.

Barclays personal and corporate banking chief executive, Ashok Vaswani, said: "Our customers have welcomed this convenient new way of depositing one of the oldest forms of payment."

Previous plans to kill off cheques from 2018 were ditched a few years ago after the Payments Council faced an outcry from MPs, small businesses, charities and pensioner lobby groups, who said the needs of millions of vulnerable people were being ignored.

Barclays has been working closely with the Government towards the aim of delivering a UK-wide solution to cheque imaging.

A previous government consultation found that the traditional method of processing cheques creates "delay and expense".

When paper cheques are paid into banks, they end up going on a journey around the country, travelling to the clearing centres of both the bank collecting the cheque and the paying bank so that sort codes, account numbers, and signatures can be checked for fraud and to establish there are sufficient funds.

Last month, Lloyds Bank confirmed that it was piloting a scheme which would enable customers to pay in cheques using their smartphone.

The bank said it had started a pilot with more than 1,750 members of staff to trial the system to pay in cheques by mobile phone.