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Cheques? In 2021? Next you’ll have me believing you can scrawl a signature to verify a card payment.
Sadly still a thing.
Wire transfers in Canada (even domestic ones) are not available in online personal banking. You have to show up in a branch or call. Either way you will have to pay stupid amount of money for one. Someone receiving one will also have to pay "administrative fee" for the privilege - iirc it was $10-20 per wire transfer.
All you have are "email transfers" using Interac, which are usually capped at $3000 per transfer & per day.
So cheques. For everything that you can't/won't pay with CC. Rent? Write your landlord some cheques, preferably in advance for the duration of the lease, etc.
After moving to Canada almost a decade ago it felt like I was experiencing late 90's EU banking all over again, except European banking was rapidly evolving then and the only improvement I've seen in Canadian banking in close to 10 years were:
- I could set online banking password longer than 8 characters and use characters other than letters (I'm serious)
- I can cash a cheque by taking photos of it with a mobile app
The only 2FA available for personal banking is still SMS and you have those dumb "security" questions everywhere.
> those dumb "security" questions
Facebook post: "The name of your mother and your favourite colour is your rapper name. What is it?"
Online bank Tangerine password is 4 digits. It’s ridiculous.
I am in France and I always paid house works (roof, floor etc..) in cheques,because it doesn't require me to add a new recipient to my online bank account, which always takes couple of days, and then hangs there until i remove it.
There is also a special type of cheques (inconveniently amd generically named "cheque de banque") , which blocks the amount entirely on the issuer side, which guarantees that receiver will actually get the money. Quite useful when you don't want to walk around with huge pile of cash, because bank wire takes days and you don't want to make one before seeing the goods
> require me to add a new recipient to my online bank account, which always takes couple of days
> because bank wire takes days
Wow that's some stone-age trash. I haven't encountered such garbage in one other EU country in 20 years.
> because bank wire takes days
Wait what? I thought there was a European regulation that bank wires must be completed in less than 24 hours? Or was that Germany only? Most wiring from a German to another German account happens instantly nowadays.
Regular SEPA wires between different banks take about one working day in France. But they can take up to three, legally. And four in the EU. Transfers in the same bank are usually instant.
In practice expect a 24h turnaround on a SEPA transfer during the week.
SEPA Instant Credit Transfer is probably what you're thinking about, but it's not universally supported by every bank yet.
Something similar happens in Ireland.
The regulations make the Outgoing bank process the Wire rapidly, within 24 hours or much less.
However the receiving bank can let it sit to clear for multiple days.
Here it's the older more establishment banks dragging their heels.
Same in the US. We used a check to pay for some work recently but for smaller household services they might accept Venmo.
In the US we have cashiers checks which are pretty much the same as you described. I’ve used them to buy cars.
> "cheque de banque"
This is usually called a "bank draft" or a "cashier's cheque" in other places. But yes, there are still probably some use cases for it.
Banks here in NZ have stopped accepting them in the past few months, they are very much a thing who's time is passing
Checks are still big in the US, no?
Some of our clients still send us cheques (even though we explicitly note on our invoices that we don't take them) while the banks in the Netherlands won't even process them anymore... It's rough.
I find it easier to write/recieve a check and use it with my banks mobile deposit than any of the reinvented wheels.
I don't understand why we can mobile deposit checks, but using a bank app generated and signed jpg check isn't an option.
Email, txt, or even print-mail-deposit.
Recipients could do the same. Mobile deposit app opens the file instead of taking a picture, automatically stamp your endorsement, submit, done. Or print and deposit.
It could have been so simple.
Quite. They're dwindling, but at a slower pace than other countries.
In the UK they haven’t been completely phased out, but I haven’t seen a cheque or a cheque book in the last 22 years. In 2019 only 51k paper cheques where used.
That is to say, other countries have already done it.
1. https://newseventsinsights.wearepay.uk/media/e1mdcljg/pay-uk...
I used to live in a small(ish) town, roughly 6,000 population, and checks were still used regularly. Basically if you had check from a local bank you could use it the same way you'd use a card.
> Next you’ll have me believing you can scrawl a signature to verify a card payment.
I have heard a horror story from a friend who was on holiday in NYC who can't pay at a certain store (I forgot what store, sorry) because the terminals are signature-only (and the card is PIN-only because that makes a lot more sense).
Edit: If I remember correctly, it was resolved by getting a cash advance on an ATM, which a) works precisely because there's a PIN, and b) is frustrating to him because it adds up unnecessary (if the terminal worked) fees.
They didn't have the ability to do a manual card entry? Where I used to work we'd just do manual entry when issues like this occurred.
Check is still the cheapest way to move the money between bank accounts. It's basically free, besides the costs of the check itself.
This baffles me. I have never seen anyone use a cheque in my entire life. Here you can just issue a SEPA payment, free for private individuals and for business accounts.
My parents still did stuff with cheques in the 90s, iirc. Actually paying bills and being paid with them, running a company.
I think the last one I saw was some government agency refunding me 2 odd EUR in the early 00s and I forgot to cash it in for like a decade. (This is all in Germany.)
My previous apartment only accepted check and money order. My last job used to do the same for customers, but I was part of an effort to provide a system for card payments so that’s no longer true.
Circa 2003 I learned first hand that payments from bank accounts (i.e. bank transfers, standing orders, and debit card transactions) were backed by a paper cheque from your bank to the recipients bank - at least within the UK.
The big(ger) banks owned fleets of enormous OCR machines that could read and sort cheques at hundreds per second, and hundreds of employees to read the cheques that the machines couldn't. I was on a team that were supporting the rollout and testing a new set of these machines.
I don't know if this is still the case today, but I was surprised then to learn they were still paper backed.
In UK you can write a handwritten latter: please transfer £100K to a spesific bank account" and fax it to the bank, they will do it
That’s definitely not true. Every bank interaction is verified with 2FA. They had these cool personal small PIN devices that you inserted your card into, which generates a OTP that you read over the phone.
It’s mostly just app-based now, but they still exist.
In Germany too, but your signature needs to match the one on file for verification.
In US and Canada you should be able to do a similar thing by printing your own cheque. Which doesn’t have a standard. It just requires you to have all of the information that you see on the cheque itself.
In France too, officially. The law dictates what a cheque is and it can be a piece of paper with some specific info.
In reality nobody will accept these.
TIL: Americans spell "cheque" as "check".
Yeah, also, most of the world used to pay a bill using a cheque. The Americans have to do everything backwards, and they pay a check using a bill.
Idk, I pay my water bill using a check. I think it’s just restaurants that use “check” to mean bill.
And get a load of this one : the English spell chèque as "cheque" ! ;)
If you doesn't use 'em, you doesn't get to name 'em.
But they do use them? I'm not sure what your comment is supposed to mean.
Americans do. By report, Brits don't, anymore, IIUC.
Does anyone know if any way to transfer money is anything as good as Faster Payments Service in the UK? No limit, free for customer, transfers usually happen in <100ms (unless you have a shit bank that holds onto the money). Works 24/7.
Actually cheaper to send people a penny with a comment attached than send an SMS :D
It's a dream, other than the UX issue of not being very easy to set up new recipients as you need to know account details and generally there's a lot of friction to prevent fraud/mistakes (ie, it wouldn't be very good at a shop).
In the Netherlands we often use Tikkie (and there are a few other apps that work the same.) With this, we use an app that generates a link that we send to the person using whatever method suits, that link takes them through their bank auth flow to make the payment, and you have it in a second or so. This is intended for person-to-person generally and you don't need their account number. All free.
If it's something to be invoiced, the invoice will have their IBAN and a reference code to add, which works more like you describe.
Instant wire transferts. They work in all europe I assume, limited to 1000€ a day, accross banks, no additional service required. The time is mostly taken by typing the IBAN in the first time.
It’s called SEPA instant credit transfer. There can be some bank specific limits, but there’s no general upper limit. Payment is handled in seconds.
> "Nigeria ... is among the world’s most corrupt"
In practice, it means Nigeria has more retail corruption than most places.
The most corrupt countries, by take, are the US and China, but it is concentrated at the top. In China, top-level violations of the law are tolerated as a carrot-and-stick to maintain support for the regime, whereas in the US, top-level corruption is instead made wholly legal.
Russia and North Korea would like to be the most corrupt, but simply don't handle enough money.
Any thoughts as to why USPS et al. are apparently not pursuing this?
FedEx is a private company, only the USPS has actual law enforcement (fun fact: they're the oldest federal law enforcement!).
There are three reasons I can guess why at least the USPIS hasn't picked it up... they're overworked (and understaffed), the reports haven't made it past the gatekeepers (=been binned because it was too confusing), or there is an ongoing investigation that likely has been compromised now.
There will be a "cut-out" I'm naming them Steve, between the scam victims and the actual bad guys. So postal investigators can put hours of work in and tie back a bunch of cheques to Steve from Florida, and they go to Steve's house and Steve quickly admits that yeah, he sent the cheques. But Steve is getting paid $100 per week to send dozens of cheques, and Steve is so dumb his only contact "up the chain" is to somebody named "Bx$cash$$" on Telegram who told Steve it's a legitimate business venture. Steve is completely sure Bx$cash$$ is a 20-something woman from Utah, but the investigators aren't morons unlike Steve so they guess immediately that's a stock photo, and Bx$cash$$ has almost certainly never set foot on any soil with extradition to the US. Dead end.
Could they charge Steve with crimes? Yeah, and I guess if they're frustrated or Steve was obnoxious and unco-operative they will. But he's a dead end, there is no route to Bx$cash$$ whoever that might be, through Steve, and so long as America is a land of morons who dream of being billionaires there will be more Steves so why even bother?
Checks are pretty much outfased here the only way to actually cash one is in the bank, and even then you might have a hard time if its foreign.