30 Billion And Dropping

By Mark Brousseau

During a presentation at this week’s BAI TransPay conference at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, TX, Richard Oliver, executive vice president, Retail Payments Office at the Federal Reserve Bank, provided key results of the Fed’s latest three-year study of non-cash payments. The information helps define the markets for vendors, a leading provider of distributed capture solutions told me today. Oliver said there were about 30 billion checks written in 2006. The breakdown:

51 percent of the checks were written by consumers
... 32 percent of these were consumer to business remittance checks
... 6 percent were consumer to business remittance at point of sale (remote remittance)
... 13 percent were consumer to business point of sale (Back Office Conversion eligible)

25 percent of the checks were written by businesses to other businesses (includes governments)
... 16 percent were business to business (wholesale remittance)
... 5 percent were business to business remittance at point of sale
... 3 percent were business to business point of sale

17 percent of the checks were business to consumer (payroll, refunds, etc.)

7 percent were consumer to consumer casual

Note: the numbers don't add up to 100 percent because of Federal Reserve Bank rounding. Another key statistic that Oliver provided was that 2.6 billion checks were converted to ACH in 2006.

What do you think? E-mail me at m_brousseau@msn.com.