Zelle works very similarly. The difference is, there is a setup process where you tell your bank what email and/or phone number to use for payments. I assume at some point you have to tell Interac your email, so that part is probably the same. It’s very simple, but it has to be done and a lot of people haven’t done it yet because it’s so new.
I just realized, in going back through the checkbook, that I’ve actually added an additional, new reason for writing checks recently.
I started a new job in September, for which I have to take the commuter train to downtown Chicago every work day. I am now buying a quarterly parking permit from the village where I live, to park in the commuter lot at the nearby train station; this particular permit is, as far as I can tell, about the only permit/payment that one has to make to the village, which one cannot do online (and thus, pay by credit/debit card). So, I’ll now be writing one check per quarter, for certain, as long as I’m at this job.
No, you absolutely do not. Funds accidentally sent to an incorrect email address are presumably protected by the security question, for which the sender has some responsibility to make the answer non-obvious. Registering your email with Interac for auto-deposit removes the need for the security question or any other interaction entirely, and deposits then become automatic.
Then I don’t understand how it works. Don’t you have to tell Interac what email to send the payment to? How does Interac know where to send the payment?
If you are not setup for auto-deposit, think of it like a virtual cheque. You click the link, login to online banking, and deposit it. If you are setup for auto-deposit, Interac sends it directly to the registered account.
I just checked (chequed?) on my Quicken register. I wrote 5 checks last year, all to local charities as donations in memory of friends that passed during the year. And most of those organizations have the option of online donations, but if the payment processor charged a CC fee, I opted for a check.
The tradespeople who used to accept only checks (furnace/ac repair, sewer cleanout, etc.) now have apps on their phones that accept my credit card on the spot. And for our small LLC, I use my bank’s bill pay service for the 3 invoices I pay each month.
Interac knows where to send the payment because after a non-registered recipient correctly answers the security question, they are directed to login to their banking institution and select the account to receive the deposit. The actual money transfer occurs within the banks’ own networks. I suspect the reason this is possible is that the Canadian banking network is more tightly integrated than the disparate banking systems in the US, which is also a reason that it took them so long to catch up with smart cards and contactless payment terminals after they became common around most of the world.
From the Interac website:
To send money with Interac e-Transfer sign in to online or mobile banking at a participating financial institution and look for the option to send money with Interac e-Transfer. All you need is an email address and the email address and/or mobile telephone number of the person you are sending money to. Email and/or text messages carry the notification while the financial institutions use existing payment networks to transfer the money to any financial institution in Canada.
Interac e-Transfer® Help Topics - Interac
Ah, I think I understand now, and I’m sure you’re right that the much tighter Canadian bank integration played a major role.
We write about 20 checks a year. Trash service, a couple of Dr’s that we have payment plans with, and the occasional Scentsy order my wife places are all paid with checks. The most recent was just today when we had the yearly service performed on our heat pump, paid with a $280 check given to the service guy.
We moved into this house 2½ years ago and we ordered a box of new checks at that time so as to have checks that listed our correct address. IIRC it was a box of 5 books of checks, 25 checks to a book. We’re currently on the third book, which tracks.
I actually prefer paying with a check as the cleared check is proof of payment. I’ve had the power utility once tell me that a confirmation number I was given after paying with a debit card wasn’t valid and that I still owed them money. I had to go to the bank and get a statement for that particular transaction and then send it to the power company… a big PITA. When the same thing happened when my son’s school said we hadn’t paid a rather large bill I pulled up the .pdf of the canceled check, emailed it to them, and asked them to explain themselves. They immediately dropped the issue.
So I like the paper trail a check provides.
I write three or four per year. Taxes, mostly.
Still, I ordered checks early last year to replace the still-valid National Bank of Detroit checks that I had, and to replace the money market account checks that still had my late wife’s name on them.
We have a few local folks that check works best for (buying a processed pig for example or paying the gutter cleaning guy), but I expect that will go away soon. We have enough checks in the box to last us a lifetime.
Wow, am I an outlier. Just yesterday I ordered new checks for the ‘household’ account, and two months ago I had to get new checks for my personal account.
(BTW, I get them from Carousel Checks. Which I’m only mentioning because they also will sell you check registers for some trivial amount and someone upstream mentioned still using them despite not using checks.)
What was strange is that with this latest order, Carousel’s web page wouldn’t accept the routing number I put in for the bank. Turns out that they’d changed the codes when they merged with some other bank or something, and the system looks up the codes you put in to ‘personalize’ your checks, and the old code was no longer valid. At least for getting new checks, they still process the checks I write with no problem. Kind of strange.
Yeah, the routing number from your ‘old’ bank was semi-retired when your bank merged, in lieu of the routing number from the other bank. The old routing number is still valid, but it’s being phased out, so it’s not valid for new checks.
FYI, the same pdf paper trail is available when you do checks via the bank online bill pay.
You can buy check registers at Amazon. Here’s just one option:
My credit union has stacks of them in the lobby to take. I just assumed other banks do, too. I guess that’s not the case…
Eta: the Amazon ones you linked to are really inexpensive!
Maybe in the US, but here in Switzerland it’s possible to pay online.
Still gotta use them to pay rent, so once per month. I last ordered checks in 2019 and am probably good until 2026 or thereabouts. We’ll see what the future holds then.
I used to have a check book and pay bills by check perhaps 30 odd years ago. I haven’t paid by check or even received a check payment for many years now. That isn’t unusual in Australia though. Where I work we receive about $30 billion a year. There are probably less than 1,000 checks amongst the millions of payments that we receive. I think many businesses would not accept checks at all.
I’m down to writing about six checks a year, usually for tax payments, though I pay them electronically if I can using ACH transactions. I have three checking accounts, but I only have checks for one of them, the other two are online and ATM transactions only. And the account with the paper checks doesn’t have online access (my choice). I think I am down to the last ten or so checks, I should order more sometime this year. It’s been so long I forgot how I did it last time.