More than 18,500 paying institution routing transit numbers are receiving
images for payment instead of paper checks. These represent almost 14,000 financial institutions.
Substitute Checks have facilitated the transition from paper checks to check
images. The volume of substitute checks peaked during the second quarter of 2008 with 875 million
and then declined by 31% during the first quarter to 603 million.
On an average day during March 2009, 13,778 institutions received over 53
million check images for posting. When the March volume is annualized, it totals 13.4 billion for $18.1
trillion. Also, another 9 million checks per day that were sent as images and delivered to paying institutions
as substitute checks. These totaled 2.2 billion checks per year and $2.5 trillion.
This CheckImage Collaborative image clearing report reflects transactions settled
through the Federal Reserve, Viewpointe, SVPCO and local / regional exchanges. When the same payments
were cleared through two or more of these organizations, those payments were counted only once.
The 2007 Federal Reserve’s Payments Study shows that the volume of checks (both
written and paid) continue to be larger than debit card, credit card or ACH transactions. The report also shows
that the dollar amount of checks increased from 2003 to 2006 from $40 to $41.7 trillion.
Data Sources for all Statistics:
Transaction settled through the Federal Reserve, NCHA and SVPCO with no duplicate counting.