"paper checks"... wow. You guys still have those? I found a book of them when I moved house recently, unused, from 10 years ago. Don't miss them even slightly.
Most consumer spending runs through Visa/MasterCard credit or debit cards; the interchange fee is baked into the prices of consumer products. Most people have something that processes as MC/Visa (whether it is backed by a traditional bank account, line of credit, or non-check-writing account) but most people cannot accept such payments, and no one can accept them for free.
Tech-savvy consumers can pay each other small amounts of money through Venmo and Square Cash, and that is typically how smartphone-native millennials settle restaurant bills and alcohol purchases among each other. They are free, but you can't move more than a few grand. Very large organizations usually have a web portal where you can type your checking account and routing number to pull money from your bank account with 3-5 day latency through ACH. Perversely, many of them will charge a "convenience fee" for this service that is not applied to payments by check. This is also strictly less secure than payment by check, because it's at least a little bit difficult to get authentic-looking checks for account numbers that are not mine. I can type whatever I want into the box on your website.
Most consumer bank accounts have an Online Bill Pay feature with the ability to push money to organizations of this kind of size. Sometimes they work by transferring your money to a service provider who physically prints and mails a check on your behalf. Usually they're just the Push (rather than Pull) variant of ACH.
Only some banks have the ability to push ACH transfers by account and routing number, letting you pay smaller-time recipients (as long as they trust you with their account number). Sometimes you can also input an email address, and the bank emails them asking for the account details to push the payment to (because that's not reminiscent of a phishing scam at all).
There are plenty of uses cases not served by any of these options. The car dealership. The family member you're supporting. Your small-time landlord, or the friend you're subletting from. Small town governments, suburban school districts, etc. I'd guess most adults don't use checks frequently, but we still need them every once in a while.
Pretty much only get cheques from charities/clubs now, haven't written one in maybe 10 years.
I also miss things like BPay where I can pay all my bills via my Internet Banking portal. Moving to the US felt like a 10+ year regression in money related systems.
Cash is reserved for shady landlords and tax evasion.
Maybe GP can make them use Transferwise, Currencyfair or the like?
While we could do ACH transfers, it's way easier to just write a check.
I am a member of two credit unions, both of which participate in the Co-Op Shared ATM network so I can use most credit union ATMs to make withdrawals and deposits. One credit union holds my regular checking account. The other has my mortgage.
Until the automatic payment gets set up, I pay my mortgage by going to a third-credit-union ATM (owned by a CU that is also on the shared ATM network) and withdrawing a pile of cash with one CU's card. I then stick that cash back into the ATM as a deposit with the other CU's card. The payment can thus be made as a "transfer" on the mortgage CU's online banking platform.
It takes minutes to do that versus approximately 3 days to do an account-to-account transfer.
https://www.nacha.org/rules/same-day-ach-moving-payments-fas...
Never doubt the American banking system's capacity to gouge the customer.
I'd open the banking app or website, put in the other persons mobile phone number. Their name would be shown as confirmation. Enter the amount, press send. It's in their account in minutes, an hour at most.
If I transfer the same amount regularly, I'd click to make it a regular transfer.
If I don't know their phone number I'd use their account number. Either way, they're saved as a contact for next time.
No, this is just Stockholm Syndrome, sorry (and they charge you how much to print cheques again?)
Way easier is entering two or three numbers depending on the country (for SEPA payments it's two strings) , a value and done.
Details are saved if you want so you just need to pick it again next time.