Businesses & Checks with Jessica Pinkston // Cornerstone Hot Takes

On the B2B side, the interesting statistic is 80% of businesses still write checks.

Unbelievable.

So unbelievable. Consumers have moved beyond that. There was an interesting tidbit on social media a few weeks ago that said the speed at which I went from being amazed by the technology in my hands, being able to take a picture of a check with my phone, to, “I cannot believe that somebody gave me a check to deposit,” was a minuscule amount of time.

Then you look at the business side. Checks are still there, and they’re not going anywhere. There hasn’t been a way for them to go.

It’s primarily small businesses, though. So if we can, as an industry, bring on the consumerization of the payment experience and layer in real-time payments to meet those timing expectations, that could be the check disruptor.

Yeah. I mean, the stats you’ve pulled for us in the past show that while the volume of checks has gone down, the dollar amount hasn’t. Consumers have recognized, “Okay, this is dumb. We’re not doing checks anymore.” But businesses are still doing it.

So the average transaction is actually bigger on checks, and on a dollar-volume basis, it’s still massive, even though it doesn’t make any sense with all the other options that are out there.

A lot of businesses still have a mental roadblock to commercial payments. They think that it’s too expensive for them to use.

So shame on banks for making it expensive, or creating the perception of it being expensive.

They also think, which has been true in past years, that it’s too complicated for them to use. If I’ve got to know the difference between doing a debit and a credit file, am I going to be able to do it?

Let me send some money to somebody.

Let me send some money to somebody. I love that.

And that’s where I think the shift is going to occur.