Technology has made what used to be impossible seem as easy as possible. Financially speaking especially, the rise of the microchip has turned our lives into one of relative idleness and ease. This is no more true than when it comes to check cashing.
Cashing a check used to mean long lineups at the bank coupled with the agonizing realization that your check cannot be processed for one reason or another. Now, however, it's as simple as a few minutes' time at a fully interactive cashing kiosk. Take out your debit card, put your checks in an envelope, slide the envelope in the slot. Easy.
But kiosks were not the end. No, technology has made things even easier now: the Internet has supplied users with a method of check cashing online. And it's really not terribly hard to do, all things considered.
Sound impossible? That's not surprising. After all, how can a bank process checks it can't even see? There doesn't seem to be any way to verify the checks as legitimate. Yet applications and websites for this very thing exist nevertheless, and it has been performed successfully many times. How?
Cashing is as easy as scanning checks into a special piece of hardware. The scanner reads the check and sends the results to the participating institution. A "spare check" is kept in electronic form in the database, which can later be read and verified as legit, while your paper check is marked as having been processed. After that it's back to the basics: tellers read your check, verify its validity and deposit the cash to your bank account.
Sound easy? It is. Sound expensive? You bet it is. Few banks have moved to this technology because it costs so much for the applications required to run it. Yet it's just a matter of time before check cashing moves fully online. The world around us is so fully concentrated on getting things done in a reasonable amount of time that speeding up the time required to cash a check will become a staple of banking.