‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them

Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by rodgerd on Friday June 03, 2016 @08:40PM (#11834277)

Why is the US so incredibly backward with day-to-day use of money? As a Kiwi it's like jumping back thirty or forty years in time when I visit.

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Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by zb on Friday June 03, 2016 @09:23PM (#11834419)

It's a scale thing, I think. In NZ if you are a bank wanting to introduce new technology for payments then you have exactly 5 other banks that you need to get on board. In the US there's many thousands.

e.g. The NZ banks jointly own the company that processes EFTPOS payments. A system like that could never emerge in the US. Instead, people have debit cards, which are manageable because they go through the credit card companies and there are only a handful of those.

But yeah, it's all incredibly primitive and fraud-prone compared to NZ or Europe (I've lived in all three).

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Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by ido on Friday June 03, 2016 @10:47PM (#11834689)

Scale might explain NZ but not the EU?

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Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by palunon on Friday June 03, 2016 @11:52PM (#11834828)

Well, the EU isn't a country.

Scale might explain it for individual countries situation

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Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by icebraining on Saturday June 04, 2016 @01:16AM (#11835030)

Well, the EU isn't a country.

But it still has introduced SEPA over its whole area. If anything, a country should have less of a problem than a still somewhat disjoint union of 28 countries.

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Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by toomanybeersies on Saturday June 04, 2016 @07:32AM (#11835945)

You're right there. NZ introduced a new interbank transfer system about 5 years back I think, and by the end of this year, all the banks are going to be on it, ANZ is the only bank that isn't right now. It means that instead of inter-bank transfers being processed once a day at closing, they're now processed hourly.

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Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by deadtofu on Friday June 03, 2016 @11:37PM (#11834798)

"Collectively owned" sounds too socialist for most (uniformed) US voters unfortunately.

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Re:‘Stop using paper checks,’ says agency in charge of them by icebraining on Saturday June 04, 2016 @01:27AM (#11835063)

US banks, through their American Bankers Association, already collectively own the Corporation for American Banking, which provides services to all banks. The average voter might have misgivings about collective ownership, but banks will hardly let it get in the way of their business.

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