Reality cheque: Will paper cheques soon be a thing of the past for small business?
The old ways of making payments is not just shrinking; they’re often vanishing entirely. Consider cheques, printed slips of paper your bank issues to you, tied to your account, and filled out by you to pay for a purchase or bill. Electronic means of payment, like Apple Pay, PayPal, and Interac, are taking over where once only a paper cheque was an accepted method of payment. Most of the changes have occurred at the consumer level. Increasingly, small businesses want more options when it comes to point-of-sale payment choices for customers, in addition to back-office payment options for suppliers and vendors. However, to make these options available, Canada needs to modernize its payment infrastructure, and to cover the cost of making these changes, banks may need to charge a fee for these services. Keeping these costs low is key to small businesses using them.
“Why cheques? For starters, accepting a cheque as payment can be less costly for a small business than accepting a credit card payment, which has merchant fees as high as three to four per cent of the transaction value.”