From the merchants perspective, I would think that eliminating the hassle of filling out deposit slips would be good. Also, electronic transactions (ECC) are going to clear in 48 business hours so the merchant will find out about NSF items much quicker. This keeps him/her from accepting more checks from the NSF account. And don’t forget about the RDI fee. An RDI fee is what the bank charges the merchant when a check bounces. This fee is usually somewhere between $3.00 - $7.50 but I talked with a convenience store yesterday that was paying $10.00. With ECC, there is no RDI fee.If you get a lot of returned items, this alone would make ECC the better choice.

We had a group come through town 6 months ago and wrote about 60 bad checks, all on a closed account. We put the ECC into our stores and now all the checks are verified before we take them. We still get some bad checks but one thing our company has noticed is that we don’t have much trouble collecting them.

Hi Stewart and welcome to our information board. What you are saying is not out of the ordinary. Verification is often part of the ECC process and the results are never disappointing. If you had been using ECC (or even just check verification) when the “bad guys” hit your stores, the velocity settings would have stopped them before they could do so much damage.