Why are the banks and their customers in the United States still using checks? [duplicate]
Check use is declining here too, but it still has some practical advantages over electronic means: Because it makes money for all parties, and because the general public is reluctant to any change. Who should have an interest to change that? People. And they have no say in it. You can actually do a lot without paper checks nowadays (I only use one per year for car taxes, as they do not accept anything else), but many people shake their heads about even online banking and would never trust it. In a system where electronic payment is well developed you can consider the following 2 scenarios: Now let us zoom in. Regardless of what costs are actually charged, it should not be hard to see which system is most (real cost) efficient once electronical payments are well developed. And so, the conclusion is not hard to reach:
"We have a local bank that changed to a bill pay service.  The money is held as ""processing"" when the check is supposed to be cut and shows as cleared on the date the check is supposed to be received.  Because our business checking is with the same bank, we discovered recently that the although the check shows cleared from our account, the recipient has not received the paper check yet - and may not for 2-3 days.  We discovered this because the payroll checks we write this way (to ourselves) never arrive on the due date but clear the business account.  It appears to be a new way for banks to ride the ""float"" and draw interest on the money.  It happens with every check processed through the bill pay system and not with electronic transfers." "I know this an old thread, but one that caught my interest as I just moved to the USA from Australia. As per the OP I had never written a check in my whole life, and upon arriving in the US I was surprised as to their proliference. In Australia pretty much all bills you receive can be paid in a number of ways:  For small amounts between friends cash is probably used most, but for larger amounts direct transfer is popular. Your friend/landlord will give you their bank account number and BSB number, which identifies their bank, and then you transfer the money in. We don't have a SSN like some other countries. Cheques are still used by some however, esp by the older generations. Now that I'm in the US initially I had tried to set up direct transfer to pay my rent however the bank has a $1000 daily transfer limit. I contacted the bank to get this increased however I was informed that this limit applies to ALL accounts at the bank. I asked how do people pay their rents with this low limit and was told that most people used cheques. (This explains the strange look I got from my landlord when I asked for their bank account details so I could pay the rent!) I now have some bills to pay here and I use online banking. You enter the biller's name and address and then the bank actually prints off a cheque and posts it to the biller on your behalf! My first couple of pays here were also cheques, which were the first actual ""paychecks"" I had ever received." Rational reason. They like this method of paying. There is a delay between writing the check and having the money removed from the account. Their checkbook makes a carbon copy of the check, so they can update their balance easier. They can leave the store and update their checkbook register, or the spreadsheet or their Quicken or budget application data. They don't have to try and remember the amount, store name or date. In the united states, they may request a check written by the bank to the other party. I have had to make large payments for home settlements, or buying a car. If the transaction was over a specified limit, they wanted a cashiers check. They wanted to make sure it wouldn't bounce.  I have had companies rebate me money, and say the maximum value of the check was some small value. I guess that was to prevent people from altering the check. One thing that has happened to me is that a large check I wanted to deposit was held for a few extra days to make sure it cleared. I wouldn't have access to the funds until the deadline passed. ATMs have had repeated attack vectors over the years they have proved to be quite vulnerable over and over. Worse than that many of the attacks haven't been fixed either, its only secrecy of the attack vectors that save them.  But that isn't an us issue, its an issue for the bank and if they loose money due to hacks then that happens and it impacts on their profits. I have a visa with Scotiabank and I purposefully keep a negative balance at times. The guy at the bank said it was a great idea. I have never received a cheque, nor do I want one. The reason is that it allows me to make quick purchases without having to worry about paying back and due dates. Only with large purchases do I allow myself to do that. I still check in with my account every once in a while just to make sure everything is all right. It allows for good money management and piece of mind. I have been doing it for a couple of years and have not been penalized at all. (Wouldn't really make sense to do so though.) In order for you to send me check for $10 you would have to know my banking details. You would have to know the bank number and the account number. Giving you this information does put my funds at risk.  While you would know this for a small circle of friends you wouldn't know this for everybody. My parents have 19 grand kids. They would have to know the banking account information for all 19. While my parents can be trusted with this information their grand children would have to make sure that they had the updated information. Instead they just mail them a check or give them a check on their birthday or other special occasion. Most of the time that money needs to be transferred it is not important that it immediately be converted to cash. The question you referenced is about how the Unbanked function: The unbanked are adults who do not have their own bank accounts.   Along with the underbanked, they may rely on alternative financial   services for their financial needs, where these are available. These people need check cashing places to get money. They don't have a bank account. There is no place for you to electronically send money. Every source of income for them has to start as cash, or be converted to cash. All spending they do is by cash. If they need to pay by check they convert cash to a money order for a fee. "A check is simply an order to the bank to pay money to someone. The payor's signature on the front of the check is all that's needed to make that order binding. If you read the check carefully, you'll see that it says ""Pay to the order of ...""; that's the payor's instruction to the bank, and as payee you can make a further order, to pay the money to someone else, in which case you'd have to endorse the check to make your order binding. But nobody does that any more; instead, people always just deposit checks into their accounts. When you deposit a check, the payor's signature is all that's needed to tell the payor's bank that it should pay the money. If your bank insists on a signature as well, that's just to pretend that they're paying attention in case it turns out that you stole the check. In reality, banks don't pay attention to signatures, nor to the name of the payee. I once put the wrong check into an envelope, and the phone company got a check for something over $700 on a bill of less than $50, payable to some completely different company; they deposited it and gave me a credit for the balance; none of the banks in the transition chain questioned it." Our banking system is pretty archaic compared to Europe's.  I never realized it until I started managing bank accounts overseas for work.  I manage many in the U.K., with their banking system you can send money to any person or company using a sort code &amp; account (similar to our routing # and account) - and it's free, simple, and reaches the other account within 2 hours.   You can include invoice #s, etc.   It's the same banks that we have over here (HSBC, Citi, etc), I imagine the only reason why they haven't rolled it out over here is because they make a lot of $$$ off of wires in the US (similar concept but we pay $30-60 per each domestic transfer and it can take days).  When my boss moved over here from UK and opened a personal bank account he was horrified to find out that the bill pay function in online banking sent paper checks and that you couldn't just send money to people/companies easily and immediately.  The infrastructure and technology is already in place at the big banks, but the banks make big fees off offering us archaic features and too few Americans realize it can be so much easier; until we legislate that banks offer us the better services that already exist elsewhere I doubt we'll get them. US checking accounts are not really secure, though many people use them. One form of check fraud has been highlighted by Prof. Donald Knuth and carried out by Frank Abagnale, as portrayed in the film Catch Me If You Can. Basically, anyone can write a check that would draw from your account merely by knowing your account number and your bank's ABA routing number.  With those two pieces of information (which are revealed on every check that you write), anyone can print a working check, either using a laser printer with MICR (magnetic ink character recognition) toner, or by placing an order with a check-printing company.  The only other missing element is a signature, which is a pretty weak form of authentication. When presented with such a check, your bank would probably honor it before finding out, too late, that it is fraudulent. A variant of this vulnerability is ACH funds transfers.  This is the mechanism through which you could have, say, your utility company automatically withdraw money from your account to pay your bill.  Unfortunately, the transfer is initiated by the recipient, and the system relies largely on trust with some statistical monitoring for suspicious patterns. Basically, the whole US checking system is built with convenience rather than security in mind, since other institutions are able to initiate withdrawal transactions by knowing just the ABA number and account number.  In practice, it works well enough for most people, but if you are paranoid about security, as you seem to be, you don't want to be using checks. The European system, which has largely eliminated checks in favor of payer-initiated push transactions, is safer by design. "There are two different issues at play here, and they are completely separate from each other: A bank or cashier's check is ""safer"" than a regular personal or business check because it avoids problem #1. Problem #2 exists with all kinds of paper checks. I assume the reason the warnings are about cashier's check moreso than personal checks, is simply because people already know to wait for personal checks to clear before handing over merchandise to the buyer. People are less likely to do that when receiving cashier's checks, but perhaps they still should if there is any doubt about the validity of the check. One could argue that a cashier's check actually provides a false sense of security due to this (to the receiver). On the flip side, if you are the payer, then a cashier's check could be thought of as more secure than a personal check because you don't have to reveal your bank account information to a stranger." This question was asked three years ago, but now that it's 2017 there is actually a relatively easy, cheap and fast solution to at least the first half of your question. To cash the check: I've done this a half dozen times while abroad (from the US) without any problems. Some banks charge their own customers if they make use of a teller. That is what you are doing. You are going to a bank where you are not a customer and requesting a transaction that requires a teller. If you cash the check by going though your bank, the issuer's bank only handles it as a non-teller transaction. Because more than a few utility companies have overcharged me in the past, and with online banking they can automatically deduct from my account. With a check I can control how much I pay them. It's much easier to fight a charge when they don't already have your money. "Welcome to the 21st century, the New Order. Forget all that legal mumbo jumbo you may have read back in law school in the 1960s about commercial code. Its all gone now. Now we have Check 21 and the Patriot Act !!! Basically what this means is that because some Arab fanatics burned down the World Trade Center, the US government and its allied civilian banking company henchmen now have total control and dictatorship over ""your"" money, which is no longer really money, but more like a ""credit"" to your account with THEM which they can do with what they want. Here are some of the many consequences of the two aforementioned acts: (1) You can no longer sue a bank for mishandling your money (2) All your banking transaction information is the joint property of the bank, its ""affiliates"" and the US Treasury (3) You can no longer conduct private monetary transactions with other people using a bank as your agent; you can only request that a bank execute an unsecured transaction on your behalf and the bank has total control over that transaction and the terms on which occurs; you have no say over these terms and you cannot sue a bank over any financial tort on you for any reason. (4) All banks are required to spy on you, report any ""suspicious"" actions on your part, develop and run special software to detect these ""suspicious actions"", and send their employees to government-run educational courses where they are taught to spy on customers, how to report suspicious customers and how to seize money and safe deposit boxes from customers when the government orders them to do so. (5) All banks are required to positively identify everyone who has a bank account or safe deposit box and report all their accounts to the government. (6) No transactions can be done anonymously. All parties to every banking transaction must be identified and recorded. So, from the above it should be clear to (if you are a lawyer) why no endorsement is present. That is because your check is not a negotiable instrument anymore, it is merely a request to the bank to transfer funds to the Treasury. The Treasury does not need to ""endorse"" anything. In fact, legally speaking, the Treasury could simply order your bank to empty your account into theirs, and they actually do this all the time to people they are ""investigating"" for supposed crimes. You don't need to endorse checks you receive either because, as I said above, the check is no longer a negotiable instrument. Banks still have people do it, but it is just a pro forma habit from the old days. Since you can't sue the bank, the endorsement is pretty meaningless because it cannot be challenged in court anyway. You could probably just write ""X"" there and they would deposit it."