Ok, I just proved that one large modern company didnt. Now do you have a cite?
To my knowledge, this method is not encouraged by financial institutions in the EU.
On the contrary.
I have no personal experience but a google showed a couple of French posters on reddit claiming it is not rare.
This site shows that checks are no longer used in many EU countries.
No, I don’t I made an observation base on recent jobs I’ve had and my kids have had. It is the new normal, especially if they use ADP payroll.
It’s quick to scribble a name and dollar amount on a check, then hand it to someone or stuff it in an envelope. Any electronic payment system is comparatively complicated for business-to-business or business-to-person payments. Most of the popular person-to-person systems like Venmo and Zelle want nothing to do with commercial transactions.
As opposed to the “normal” banking system, where someone can pay for their groceries by handing over sufficient information to the minimum-wage cashier that they could completely empty out their bank account?
It would be nice if this were true. But see my story about changing banks, and having the entirety of my savings locked up for a month.
All I’m saying is that in EU this form of payment is obsolete, discouraged or unauthorized.
And I know American officials who look down on people who pay or get paid through this means.
Up until last month I managed 4 bank accounts and and two investment accounts since I had Financial Power of attorney for another person who was unable to manage anything at all.
- Paying bills by check to individuals who cared for the ill person was an absolute necessity since
individual carers and therapists didn’t have skills to set up an online reimbursement system or trust online systems. - I paid medical bills by checks since I could save the check images from the checking account for tax purposes to prove they had cleared. Using a bill only is not ‘proof’ for the IRS. And tracking down proof by going through your credit card bills is a pain.
- Now that the person is deceased I am the executor and the bank has to pay the bills of the estate until we finish probating the will. The bank could do auto transfers to pay the bills prior to death out of the estate finance. The bank pays by check so I have a copy for…the IRS … and proof that they paid.
- The Insurance companies (one for long term care and the life insurance insurance companies) send a check rather than make an ACH transfer. This avoids a lot of fraud because the person receiving the money has to be named on the check, rather than being sent to an account. The check from the Long Term Care insurer had a lot of checks in the system to avoid fraud.
- Now that I’m settling the estate, I always receive checks for the same reason–avoiding fraud. Also I can’t make online transfer from one bank to another without a lot of paperwork so I get checks. And the bank holds the deposit for 6 days due to some money laundering thing.
- Also I personally pay electricians, plumbers, carpenters, by check. Checks don’t charge you the way online billers do.
Dunno about the USA, but in Europe you can cancel a bank transfer, especially if you think you are a victim of fraud. So it makes little difference regarding the waiting time, given that a fraud may not be immediately apparent. However, I have noticed that some bank transfers have one-day delay, and this is just for the bank to hang onto its money, the electrons have already done their work.
I last wrote a check about four years ago to someone in the UK before I had Internet banking for my UK account. On looking at the stubs, the previous check had been written about four or five years before, and I think it had only been written to draw out cash from a bank before I had a bank card. In the past I had to send checks for anything ordered by mail. These days it is all done online.
I don’t expect to write another of these things ever again, everything is done with EC cards and bank transfers. I don’t even have a credit card any longer, I only have debit cards.
This has been my experience as well—an ACH transfer takes about the same amount of time whether you use a physical check or not. If I’m transferring money between my accounts at different banks, it takes two or three days if I initiate the transfer on the bank website, but it also takes two or three days if I write a check and deposit it using the other bank’s phone app. There’s a perception that checks are old-timey and lame and bank transfers are cool and modern, but functionally they aren’t that different.
Of course there are services like PayPal and Venmo that are virtually instantaneous, and they’re great for things like reimbursing the friend who paid for lunch, but you can’t run your entire financial life on those services. I bought a car recently and the dealership wanted a check from me; I can’t imagine what kind of hilarity would have resulted if I had tried to use PayPal there.
My daughter recently borrowed ten bucks from me to pay for something (I forget what it was) and offered to repay me via Venmo. I don’t use Venmo, so I told her to forget it. It wasn’t worth $10 to go through the hassle of setting it up. If somebody owed me $100 and said it was Venmo or nothing, then I might be motivated to do something about it.
Maybe if they’re a hacker. I have not seen a receipt that would allow someone to hack my bank account. It doesn’t have my name or signature on it (chip and PIN), does not have my password, or more than four digits of my card number.
I’d be more worried about the IT guy decrypting the PIN, but they’re not minimum wage.
Ever see a check without an account and routing number?
In Canada, customers do not write cheques to businesses like that. Nobody ever writes a cheque to the grocery store. They do write cheques to landlords, or the government, because you know your landlord personally, and the government is trustworthy. Businesses can trust each other to write cheques to each other.
We use cheques, but not as often as Americans do.
Could you please elaborate a little? Obviously, there must be procedures in place to deal with transfers that were sent by mistake or fraudulent ones, but, assuming we are talking about true instant payments that are settled within seconds, how can one be cancelled? You hit the button and, bam, the money is already in someone else’s account. Similarly, are you saying it is common for some banks to just sit for a day on funds that were successfully transferred and are already available? If it turned out there were fraud, wouldn’t that take longer than a day to sort out anyway? (And it’s not like they won’t want their money back just because a couple of days have passed and you have it all in cash in a briefcase.)
Pro-tip: For every person who declares that technology X is “obsolete,” it’s (in most cases) trivially easy to find an example of a business or even a whole industry who routinely uses that same technology.
i remember when paying bills online you’d have to pay them 2-7 days ahead of the due date because that’s how long they took to clear … Now its 24-48 hours and as long as you make it before the end of the store/cc companies business day they count it as paid even if they dont take it out right away…
There are still stores that take checks here but they use them like one use atm cards … they take a check and run it through a scanner and if it clears they hand you it back with a bunch of printed stuff on it if not they hand it back politely and ask for another form of payment
oh and my mom like a lot of housewives who lived on limited funds were masters of knowing how long it took a check to clear most of the business
believe me when i say 90 percent of the checks written at a grocery store in my area in the last two weeks of the month depended on the fact that it took 7-14 days for a check to clear …
so much so that they didn’t bother putting checks through the bank from the 20th to the 3rd … MOM hated bank/atm cards but by that time shed finagled a credit card with a sizable limit she only used on holidays and the end of the month
But it was an adjustment when debit cards became a thing but what killed checks around here, for the most part, was the LA county DA’s office stopped prosecuting people for bad checks under 500 dollars in the early 90s recession…so all the small shops stopped taking them
This reminds me of the scene in John Wick where they process all their contracts using VIC-20s, typewriters and hand-rolled paper inserts into pneumatic tubes.
Or Kingsman where Valentine keeps all records via pen and paper.
Definitely not “cutting edge” but pretty much hacker-proof using either method.