Institutions have begun receiving electronic delivery of their unpaid image returns.
This report now includes the trend information for image returns. During the first ten months of 2009, the
volume of reported image returns grew by 71% from an average of 114,000 per day to 195,500.
More than 20,700 paying institution routing transit numbers are receiving images for
payment instead of paper checks. These represent over 15,400 financial institutions.
Substitute Checks have facilitated the transition from paper checks to check images.
The monthly volume of substitute checks peaked in the month of October 2007 and the quarterly volume
peaked in the second quarter 2008 with 875 million and then declined by 53% during the third quarter of
2009 to 460 million.
On an average day during October 2009, 15,418 institutions received over 57 million
check images for posting. When the October volume is annualized, it totals 14.4 billion for $16.6 trillion. Also,
another 4.1 million checks per day that were sent as images and delivered to paying institutions as substitute
checks. These totaled 1 billion checks per year and $1.2 trillion.
This CheckImage Collaborative image clearing report reflects transactions settled through
the Federal Reserve, Viewpointe, The Clearing House and local / regional exchanges. When the same payments
were cleared through two or more of these organizations, those payments were counted only once.
Data Sources for all Statistics:
Transaction settled through the Federal Reserve, NCHA and SVPCO with no duplicate counting.