Re:The debit card fee driving US banks crazy
by ghaff on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @06:21PM
(#8956869)
I easily believe those numbers-especially if they include the "electronic payments" made from my bank's website that actually just involve the bank cutting a check and mailing it. I don't actually know how the payment is made in each case but I'm pretty sure that payments to, say, my trash collection company are ultimately via paper check from my bank.
I probably write 2-3 physical checks a month (housekeeper, random other service people, personal payments for various activities) and another 2 to 3 from my bank. And that's with doing all the automatic payments for utilities etc. that I can.
Re:The debit card fee driving US banks crazy
by Symbiote on Friday January 30, 2015 @09:42AM
(#8972195)
That was my point though — British banks don't post each other cheques on anyone's behalf. There's an older BACS system for electronic transfer, and a newer one called Faster Payments.
The numbers show 13× as many electronic payments as cheques, and I can believe 10 electronic payments per person (salary, six or seven bills, couple of credit cards, plus business use).
I found some statistics, but they don't include debit (or credit) cards, just normal transfers between banks: http://www.paymentscouncil.org.uk/resources_and_publications... .
Looking at "1990 to date", I'm not sure I'm reading the tables correctly. Were there really 265 million cheques processed in January 1990? That's 10 for every household. Last month was 46 million, 1.7 for every household — still seems high.
In any case, it compares with over 620M electronic payments for December 2014.