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Cheques? In 2021? Next you’ll have me believing you can scrawl a signature to verify a card payment.
by orf 5y ago
Cheques? In 2021? Next you’ll have me believing you can scrawl a signature to verify a card payment.
- ssss11 5y agoChecks are still big in the US, no?
- zinekeller 5y agoQuite. They're dwindling, but at a slower pace than other countries.
- orf 5y agoIn the UK they haven’t been completely phased out, but I haven’t seen a cheque or a cheque book in the last 22 years. In 2019 only 51k paper cheques where used. That is to say, other countries have already done it. 1. https://newseventsinsights.wearepay.uk/media/e1mdcljg/pay-uk-annual-summary-payment-statistics-2019.pdf https://newseventsinsights.wearepay.uk/media/e1mdcljg/pay-uk...
- nicoburns 5y agoThe only times I've seen cheques in recent years are birthday presents from grandparents. I think they're still quite widely used by older people.
- tialaramex 5y agoYou have, quite understandably, misunderstood that document. What's actually going on there are still about 250k paper cheques but that document was generated during the period when they were consolidating from an older system which actually cared about physical pieces of paper to ICS, an "Image Clearing System" ie banks scan the cheque and work with just image data. The American victims in the HN linked story already have image clearing, that doesn't fix anything except it saves the banks a small amount of money. The document shows volumes dwindling at two legacy paper cheque handling organisations C&CCC and BBCCL because those firms literally no longer exist today, the document was produced by Pay UK, their successor in practice, which replaced their paper processes with images. But end users still write and receive physical cheques, it's just that banks don't want to spend money on physically moving cheques. The actual volume of cheques stayed at around 250 000 per year, average value of a cheque about £1500 (so "Buy a used car" money, but not "Buy groceries" money or "Buy a house" money) and total value about £400M (or £400 billion if the obvious typographical error in the column headings is true...). I expect data for 2020 will be very different, due to the pandemic, but that document is for 2018 and 2019. Cheques are still gradually going away in the UK, I didn't write a cheque in the past five years and most of my accounts have no way to draw cheques against them. But that document isn't the evidence you thought it was.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- grenoire 5y agoSome of our clients still send us cheques (even though we explicitly note on our invoices that we don't take them) while the banks in the Netherlands won't even process them anymore... It's rough.
- beerandt 5y agoI find it easier to write/recieve a check and use it with my banks mobile deposit than any of the reinvented wheels. I don't understand why we can mobile deposit checks, but using a bank app generated and signed jpg check isn't an option. Email, txt, or even print-mail-deposit. Recipients could do the same. Mobile deposit app opens the file instead of taking a picture, automatically stamp your endorsement, submit, done. Or print and deposit. It could have been so simple.
- TheFreim 5y agoI used to live in a small(ish) town, roughly 6,000 population, and checks were still used regularly. Basically if you had check from a local bank you could use it the same way you'd use a card.
- zinekeller 5y ago> Next you’ll have me believing you can scrawl a signature to verify a card payment. I have heard a horror story from a friend who was on holiday in NYC who can't pay at a certain store (I forgot what store, sorry) because the terminals are signature-only (and the card is PIN-only because that makes a lot more sense). Edit: If I remember correctly, it was resolved by getting a cash advance on an ATM, which a) works precisely because there's a PIN, and b) is frustrating to him because it adds up unnecessary (if the terminal worked) fees.
- TheFreim 5y agoThey didn't have the ability to do a manual card entry? Where I used to work we'd just do manual entry when issues like this occurred.
- Taniwha 5y agoBanks here in NZ have stopped accepting them in the past few months, they are very much a thing who's time is passing
- bufferoverflow 5y agoCheck is still the cheapest way to move the money between bank accounts. It's basically free, besides the costs of the check itself.
- moooo99 5y agoThis baffles me. I have never seen anyone use a cheque in my entire life. Here you can just issue a SEPA payment, free for private individuals and for business accounts.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wink 5y agoMy parents still did stuff with cheques in the 90s, iirc. Actually paying bills and being paid with them, running a company. I think the last one I saw was some government agency refunding me 2 odd EUR in the early 00s and I forgot to cash it in for like a decade. (This is all in Germany.)
- cafard 5y agoMy wife and I still write a few checks every month (USA). Of course, we may well be the age of your parents.
- the_only_law 5y agoMy previous apartment only accepted check and money order. My last job used to do the same for customers, but I was part of an effort to provide a system for card payments so that’s no longer true.
- Jenk 5y agoCirca 2003 I learned first hand that payments from bank accounts (i.e. bank transfers, standing orders, and debit card transactions) were backed by a paper cheque from your bank to the recipients bank - at least within the UK. The big(ger) banks owned fleets of enormous OCR machines that could read and sort cheques at hundreds per second, and hundreds of employees to read the cheques that the machines couldn't. I was on a team that were supporting the rollout and testing a new set of these machines. I don't know if this is still the case today, but I was surprised then to learn they were still paper backed.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoIn UK you can write a handwritten latter: please transfer £100K to a spesific bank account" and fax it to the bank, they will do it
- orf 5y agoThat’s definitely not true. Every bank interaction is verified with 2FA. They had these cool personal small PIN devices that you inserted your card into, which generates a OTP that you read over the phone. It’s mostly just app-based now, but they still exist. https://images.app.goo.gl/BJ6CGR4foeQhRmhw8 https://images.app.goo.gl/BJ6CGR4foeQhRmhw8
- naturalauction 5y agoI think the GP was invoking the fact that a cheque can be written on anything in the UK (though not true anymore for all banks I think) - see https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/09/plywood_cheque/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/04/09/plywood_cheque/ . Not sure if you can fax those cheques though.
- ClumsyPilot 5y agoI've literally done it a few weeks ago. You can authorise a BACS transfer on a business bank acccount with a fax if you use Natwest
- orf 5y agoAhh, it’s a business account and not a personal one. Even so, it doesn’t add up. You’re saying anyone can just fax transfer orders to your bank if they know your account number without including any authentication information of any type? And you’re OK with this?
- polymatter 5y agofwiw, it probably depends on the bank and the customer. I used to work for a large insurance company in London. There I could (and did) authorise 6 digit transfers to new accounts with just a fax with the (perpetually busy) directors signature. One time the bank made a mistake, and one simple phonecall from me was all it took to resolve (with no verification of who I was - unless they did some callerid check?). The level of customer service was astonishing to me, but that account was probably worth it to the bank to eat any fraud until it got too serious.
- dgan 5y agoI am in France and I always paid house works (roof, floor etc..) in cheques,because it doesn't require me to add a new recipient to my online bank account, which always takes couple of days, and then hangs there until i remove it. There is also a special type of cheques (inconveniently amd generically named "cheque de banque") , which blocks the amount entirely on the issuer side, which guarantees that receiver will actually get the money. Quite useful when you don't want to walk around with huge pile of cash, because bank wire takes days and you don't want to make one before seeing the goods
- raverbashing 5y ago> "cheque de banque" This is usually called a "bank draft" or a "cashier's cheque" in other places. But yes, there are still probably some use cases for it.
- wil421 5y agoSame in the US. We used a check to pay for some work recently but for smaller household services they might accept Venmo. In the US we have cashiers checks which are pretty much the same as you described. I’ve used them to buy cars.
- mbirth 5y ago> because bank wire takes days Wait what? I thought there was a European regulation that bank wires must be completed in less than 24 hours? Or was that Germany only? Most wiring from a German to another German account happens instantly nowadays.
- Bayart 5y agoRegular SEPA wires between different banks take about one working day in France. But they can take up to three, legally. And four in the EU. Transfers in the same bank are usually instant. In practice expect a 24h turnaround on a SEPA transfer during the week. SEPA Instant Credit Transfer is probably what you're thinking about, but it's not universally supported by every bank yet.
- Plasmoid2000ad 5y ago
- c2h5oh 5y agoSadly still a thing. Wire transfers in Canada (even domestic ones) are not available in online personal banking. You have to show up in a branch or call. Either way you will have to pay stupid amount of money for one. Someone receiving one will also have to pay "administrative fee" for the privilege - iirc it was $10-20 per wire transfer. All you have are "email transfers" using Interac, which are usually capped at $3000 per transfer & per day. So cheques. For everything that you can't/won't pay with CC. Rent? Write your landlord some cheques, preferably in advance for the duration of the lease, etc. After moving to Canada almost a decade ago it felt like I was experiencing late 90's EU banking all over again, except European banking was rapidly evolving then and the only improvement I've seen in Canadian banking in close to 10 years were: - I could set online banking password longer than 8 characters and use characters other than letters (I'm serious) - I can cash a cheque by taking photos of it with a mobile app The only 2FA available for personal banking is still SMS and you have those dumb "security" questions everywhere.