27 ms·

Check 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 ago
This 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 ago
  My 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 ago
    My 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 ago
  My 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 ago
Circa 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.
- viceroyalbean 5y ago
  That sounds insane. What's the average processing time on a payment in that case?
  - Jenk 5y ago
    Multiple business days for clearance. This was before BACS and SWIFT, so now I am assuming we don't have the same paper trail. A transaction would show up on the system as pending pretty promptly, so you could do your accounting etc - but they wouldn't clear until the cheque was received.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    Back in the 1990s, they literally flew these on private planes. It was worth it to get a billion dollars in checks to the other end a day sooner, thereby saving one day's interest on a billion dollars. I talked to a pilot who flew those flights. He said that it would be gone in a year or two, replaced by electronic transfer.

moooo99 5y ago

This 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 ago
My 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 ago
  My 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 ago
My 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 ago

Circa 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.

viceroyalbean 5y ago
That sounds insane. What's the average processing time on a payment in that case?
- Jenk 5y ago
  Multiple business days for clearance. This was before BACS and SWIFT, so now I am assuming we don't have the same paper trail. A transaction would show up on the system as pending pretty promptly, so you could do your accounting etc - but they wouldn't clear until the cheque was received.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Back in the 1990s, they literally flew these on private planes. It was worth it to get a billion dollars in checks to the other end a day sooner, thereby saving one day's interest on a billion dollars. I talked to a pilot who flew those flights. He said that it would be gone in a year or two, replaced by electronic transfer.