I'd probably wait a few months to make sure there were no major bugs in the system, and then go for it!

Although, I think I get only about 4-5 checks per year (everything I do is electronic already).

I run a small business out of my home and my local branch of my credit union isn't close. Either I do my deposits infrequently when I'm going by the branch or I mail them in (they've been lost in the mail once, so that option is no longer on the table). If they implemented this, I'd love them even more.

The bank I work for has offers this as a service for business customers (they just pay for the reader) for almost a year. There are system requirements (XP-Vista), and you must be running firewall and Aniti-Virus (no integration with Mac users yet, as it works along with a software interface for "pre-proofing" your deposits)

Surprisingly, most business owners are uninterested. Why, is beyond me...

National City Bank has been offering this service to its business customers for a couple of years now. It works really well and haven't lost a check yet.

I would use it if I had it available.

I've used USAA's system a few times, but it's impractical if you have a large number of checks to deposit. Of course, if you need the money immediately, it's well worth the hassle.

Also, I do a lot of rebates and the checks come in all shapes and sizes. Unfortunately, the deposit @home with USAA isn't compatible with all checks. It does most of them, but occasionally the weird sized ones won't work and you have to deposit them by mail.

I have been using deposit at home through USAA since they first introduced it. I have yet to come across any problems whatsoever and love that my check is deposited and ready for withdrawal immediately rather then waiting to send my check to them and waiting for it to clear. I have switched to USAA exclusively for banking due to the deposit at home.

It almost seems to me that it puts the burden of "work" related to putting the check into the account on the shoulders of the customer. That's what the teller's are for, thanks.

I've been doing everything EXCEPT deposits electronically for years. Bill payments, reconciliation, etc. I only go to my branch to make deposits, and then it's usually because half a dozen odd checks have stacked up for months. Then I spend 30 minutes filling out those stupid ATM deposit envelopes. I'd love to skip that. I'm in.

The only thing I don't like about it with USAA is the deposit limit of $5000. Those are the checks I don't want to send through the mail and risk losing! I'm not sure if that is a limit in place by them, or some sort of banking regulation.

The system is very easy to use, but like others have said it would take a while to deposit multiple checks.

Yeah I would if I had a scanner (or whatever you would need). I HATE my bank's new ATMs that make you submit each check & jump thru a bunch of hoops. It takes twice as long now at the atm than the old way. The first time I used it ... it ate my paycheck & basically shut down/rebooted. My check was lost somewhere in the machine. Had to go back to the bank when it opened to make sure they recieved it.

I am considering using my work's direct deposit because of my bank's new fucked up atms.

@forgottenpassword: How come you don't already use direct deposit?

It's a mystery why this country still uses such antiquated things as cheques. Do banks not realise that in other less advanced countries cheques died out with the dodo? Money is now just a series of digits in a country there really is no reason to ever right a cheque. Everything should just be an electronic transfer. When I came to the US I was astonished to be presented with a book of cheques. Please move into the 20th Century and get rid of these paper nuisances!

@angelman: They presented you with a book of checks when you arrived in the US? Geez, I guess visitors get some great perks coming to the US!

@angelman: My grandmother is antiquated, but we still use her for her delicious mashed potatoes. Some old things still have a purpose.

Like checks have the purpose of getting pulled out of that lady's purse in line at the checkout when she gets the total of her bill, and not a second before. So we all stand there and wait while she writes it out.

I've used USAA's Deposit@Home before and it's convenient. I like the idea, but I don't regularly have my scanner set up so what I usually do is deposit checks/cash into my account at Bank of America and transfer the money. I use BoA for my car payment which is automatically withdrawn and as a teller. That's it.

I would love it if ING picked this up for their electric orange accounts. The only reason I have another bank account now it so I can deposit the checks I get every once and awhile.

Between direct deposit and debit cards, I get maybe 2 or 3 checks a year. So hitting the bank a couple of times a year isn't really a big deal for me.

@nequam:

Because i have been a bit mistrustful of it & dont like change. Also My bank is conveniently close & I often need to withdraw a twenty every other week or so anyway.

The only thing that isnt convenient are the new pain-in-the-ass atms.

Do other people's banks do their electronic bill paying service by still printing out paper checks and mailing them out for you?

I thought other banks did some sort of direct to electronic transfer of the money? Maybe our bank is just antiquated?

I could see the USAA deposit from home scanner being great if you ran a business from home. Otherwise we get everything as direct deposit.

Being in the military, 600 miles from my nearest branch, I would love to be able to scan my checks. I could have gotten USAA and had the feature years ago, but I didn't want the hassle of changing banks. But now that this is a possibility, I am excited. I won't have to wait for my bank to get my check, lose it, find it, and then deposit it for me(the average time from me dropping a check in the mail to getting the deposit has been 8 business days. :( )

I know all of my coworkers with out of state banks will be happy when this feature hits thier banks too.

I think its an outstanding feature. I have used USAA's deposit@home many times (I'm active duty military overseas) and it has worked perfectly every time. By the way, it's free and prety simple to use (folow the directions with your scanner at home). You also need to consider that USAA doesn't have many branch offices (there's the one in San Antonio and maybe a couple others). If you use USAA for banking (very competive banking practices), it is a lot easier making deposits this way as opposed to mailing the check in or depositing it into a local bank and making the transfer. Its also worth noting that with the Deposit@Home, the funds are available immediately instead of having to wait a day or two when depositing a check at your local teller. I would think the majority of people (consumers, not businesses) aren't depositing many checks on regular basis (think Direct Deposit)... so think in terms of what is your time worth? Calculate the time to drive to the bank, wait in line, conduct your deposit, and drive home. Then of course there's the money saved by the bank for the reduced foot traffic at the branch office. Other banks should folow the lead on this.

We're customers of USAA, and have been using the Deposit@Home for a while now. My employer is small enough that direct deposit isn't an option, so for the 12 checks we get each year there, plus a number of other checks each quarter, it's great.

The $5k limit? :shrug: I wish I made enough money for that to be an issue. :)

I hate to nit-pick, but isn't an online poll about whether or not you'd like an additional online activity inherently biased?

@randombob: It's probably a bit of both, the bank wanting to offer a feature that others don't, and yes, offloading more of their costs on you.

My concern would be for the scammer who got an account with a bank offering this kind of service, who also had a machine that could print checks with valid magnetic ink encoding. They get your banks routing number and your account number, fake a check from you to them and feed it into the deposit machine. You're out the money and involved in a fight to prove the signature on the fake check isn't yours. They of course deposited a few thousand worth of fake checks in their account, cleaned it out and are long gone by the time you discover what's happened.

@liljimmynorton: YES!

i'm far too much of a paranoid indiviual to use this service electively. i would only use this if i had to. there are some things i just prefer to do in person. money transactions are one of them.

Another USAA member chiming in. I now live very far from USAA so making a physical deposit is no go. So, I do have the free envelopes to make mail deposits but they can take 5 days sometimes. So, I use the deposit@home service on the rare occasion I get a check. One problem is that money orders and some check with heavy amounts of "security" feautures on them will not scan. And if my check is over 5k, I won't mind spending the $10 to overnight it. I see people every day at work that loose untold interest and safety because they won't spend a couple extra bucks having the money wired or FedEx'd.

While it can be very frustrating to scan the checks I still won't give up my account at USAA. I've never had the same bad experiences and "gotcha" fees that I've had from every other bank in the universe. I love USAA and couldn't imagine changing.

Something that is exceedingly funny since I actually work for another financial institution and don't have anything other than the required account with nothing in it.

I also love USAA's Deposit @ Home. When we lived overseas, my kids would get birthday checks sent to Portugal from their grandmother who lived in Texas. Which we would have to immediately mail back to San Antonio for deposit into their accounts. Dumb!

Now when the kids get their birthday checks I scan them in and deposit them right into their USAA savings accounts.

It's really convenient. I don't understand why someone would not want this.

I would most definitely use this feature. I am extremely busy during regular business hours, and even though the bank is a 10 minute walk away, find myself able to make it to the bank so rarely that I often have checks for a month or two before I get around to depositing them. Doing so from home would be TREMENDOUSLY helpful.

My credit union is not close to my home, and a bit of walk from work. I don't mind walking, really, but I only get a half hour for lunch and that kind of kills my lunch half-hour. I would love to have the option to scan checks at home for deposit.

@VA_White: I have done the same thing for my childs birthday checks. Her great grandparents still use checks when the send money and I use USAA deposit@home to do these transactions. I feel much safer logining into a secure website, which I already do to check balences and transfer money around, and scan a check in. For me, it is either using the scanner and getting the deposit right away or sending through the mail and taking near a week for the deposit and having the chance of getting lost.

What I want is (essentially) an at-home ATM. My wife, however, would probably argue against it. She's the saver, I'm the spender. The electronic deposit would be useful for her paychecks, though.

Sure, I'd adopt it. But at, perhaps, four checks a year, it'd be a waste.

@angelman: Russian, I presume?

@punkrawka: LOL srsly

My husband and I are USAA customers and have been using this feature for a while. It's great but there is a $2500 limit which can be inconvenient.

Personally, I don't have a problem going to the bank, waiting in line and doing things the old way.

Actually... Part of me prefers it. It wasn't until just recently (the last 8 or so months) that I set up direct deposit with the place I've been employed for almost 4 years.

Anything that keeps us off (lowering our carbon output) I see as a good thing. Sadly, I think this will just give people more time to drive their 12 miles per gallon SUV's to the mall thats 15-30 miles away. *sigh*

     Give me one real check, a copy of the Catch Me If You Can book, and an hour with photoshop and I can turn out perfect counterfit checks for you.

 

     There's a few more secure ways to bring banking into the future that've been around for awhile. They're called direct deposit, and paypal.

I have to drive 20 minutes out of my way to the closest credit union service center that will take my deposits... so for me, this is a definite YES.

Foreseeable problem. MICR ink for the main-stream HP inkjet printers is readily available. And I can't clearly remember if it can be found for laser printers. So you can presumably print a rather convincing check with any routing and account numbers you want.

For those unfamiliar with MICR, it's Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, and it's what all of those numbers at the bottom of your checks are handled with. It's what keeps you from taking a black pen and fudging a number or two.

Simple check forgery from the comfort of your own home. That's just great. And in a dispute over whether it was a real check or not, you can complain that you've "already thrown it out and where's your damn money?" I just don't see this working out well.

My credit union [www.advancial.org] was advertising this on their web site when I connected up today.

iDeposit: Sign up inside cuAnywhere to start virtually depositing checks.

I'm not sure that I like the idea of virtually depositing checks, but I do like the idea of being able to deposit checks from home, at totally odd hours.

@angelman: Amen to that. As a freelancer, I have my share of payments via cheques that are subject to several days scrutiny by my bank, who can claim that "they're from out of town", so while the money goes into the bank upon their scan, I don't get mine for another 7 days. Add to that the wasteful filling out of deposit forms, filling out the same information on a deposit envelope, then toggling through an ATM menu to deposit it makes ours the most antiquated banking system in the western world.

would I scan my checks at home? heck yeah. no walking to the bank for me, since the closest town with a bank is 12 miles away. and that way i don't have to worry about finding a time when i'm in town and i'm not working and the bank's open. . .

This is the thing that would get me to switch to online banking. I love the idea of online banking, and the biggest thing that's stopped me from going that way is depositing checks, as I tend to get just enough checks that it isn't quite worth going that way. I'd be surprised if, after USAA, the first banks using this weren't the big online ones.

In the UK if I want to pay the plumber say all I need do is get the equivalent of his check routing number and account number (same info as is on a cheque here) and then log on to the bank website, enter the details and press transfer. You can do the same here the key difference is that in the UK its free.. here it's not. I was blown away by the "bill pay" service here where you enter all information on the website all high tech and 21st century and that gets turned into a paper cheque mailed to the recipient who then has to take that to the bank where they scan it into the system where it gets turned back into numbers in a computer again.. talk about waste of time...

I've used the USAA system since it came out (~2years ago). I have to admit I don't get a lot of check but it is very helpful. The best thing is that the deposit happens instantly, alot faster than mailing them in like I used to have to. USAA only has one bank (in San Antonio) but has the best online, phone service I've ever seen. I've rarely been on hold for more than a few minutes and can allows understand what is said.

Schwab, are you listening? DO WANT.

Commerce offers this to their business customers under the name RapidDeposit, and has done so for a while.

I'm a big fan, since it means I can retain the physical checks in case of dispute, instead of having only the scanned image that would be available if I deposited at the bank.

I've tried the USAA stuff on my personal account, but never got it to work with my scanner.

People still use cheques in america?