Will Fast Push Transactions Eliminate Paper Checks?

Same-Day Automated Clearing House (ACH) credits are speedy digital fund disbursement alternatives to customers writing and snail mailing paper checks to pay bills.

Depository institutions use this nationwide network to transmit electronic transfer batches. So, offering these more affordable, faster, and convenient payments is vital for today’s progressive businesses.

Understanding Check Type Differences

Paper checks: These official consumer slips draw money from bank accounts. Payers fill in payees’ names and dollar amounts with their personal signatures authorizing distributions to billers. These documents are safer than cash because canceled checks become permanent payment records.

Electronic checks: Like their paper counterparts above, electronic versions take funds from bank accounts. Usually, they include tracking numbers like those on handwritten checks. Payers can list e-checks in their checkbook registers as they do traditional ones.

Adopting Newer Technology

Writing checks to pay bills has long been a common practice, thanks to that conventional payment method’s long-standing infrastructure. But consumers wanting simple, speedy transfers to deliver readily available funds instantly could make push disbursements the new standard. Buyers send or push credits to sellers on reliable ACH rails users have trusted for 40 years. That familiar process involves well-established card issuers and financial institutions. So, the adoption curve could be shorter than some people expect for this major change.

Appreciating Multiple Benefits

Buyers: Efficient push disbursement technology streamlines your patron’s payment process. It conserves customers’ check printing, writing, mailing, and tracking time and costs. When consumers send money to pay mortgages, auto loans, residential utility services, insurance premiums, and medical/dental treatments 24/7, their guaranteed funds’ immediate availability avoids late fees. Same-Day ACH’s security measures reduce fraud chances.

Merchants: Industry reports indicate that processing just one business invoice and paper check costs $4 to $8. By converting to electronic payments, a firm that processes 10,000 monthly checks could save over a staggering $480,000 annually.

Faster clearance means sellers and billers can use incoming funds sooner when they don’t need to wait days to weeks for patrons’ checks to arrive via snail mail. Transfer guarantee and instant access to guaranteed deposits turn them into all-important working capital that improves corporate cash flow. Electronic settlements reduce companies’ paper usage. Meeting customers’ desires for automated payments increases retention.

Partnering With E-Complish

As a key payment solution provider, E-Complish is accelerating the consumer-driven paperless trend. Trust your ACH payment processing to our company. E-Complish will help your company stay competitive. This efficient ACH processor handles large postal mail, phone, and email transaction batches. It will integrate with your website and/or billing system to expedite online push payments.

Dependable security features exceed internet encryption to combine multi-password defenses with user-level safeguards that require personal identification numbers (PINs) for access.

Replacing Old Methods with More Electronic Options

After being helpful for centuries, paper checks began their decline in America during the mid-1990s. But the U.S., the slowest country to adopt electronic substitutes, claimed the biggest check writers in 2015. France took second place for usage. Then Canada, the U.K., and Australia followed.

Moving beyond handwritten routines has come more swiftly in several other nations. In 1993, Finnish banks quit issuing checks. Sweden reduced that paper method dramatically by initiating check fees and promoting alternative payment forms. The Netherlands eliminated checks in 2002. When 2017 arrived, Denmark joined the trend. Checks are virtually extinct in Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. U.K. banks process a dwindling number of consumer checks today.

The Check 21 federal law has allowed American financial institutions to process paper checks electronically since 2003, which could end the traditional practice of handling them physically. Industry indicators are raising the odds that consumers, corporations, and government entities could quit using printed checks soon. A recent survey found that 71 percent of respondents believe children currently younger than age 10 will never need to learn the dying art of writing checks.

To get America in line with other nations, attempts to modernize its system include a Fed-convened faster payment task force. It set a recent goal to make platforms that deliver secure, electronic, real-time transfers available to everyone everywhere by 2020. If anyone’s still using checks, that will marginalize them even more.

E-Complish simplifies your cost calculations. Instead of charging setup fees, we take just a fraction of every transaction we process.