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Survey: Check Use Drops to All-Time Low for B2B Payments

Cision Pr News Wire

Check usage continues to decline for business-to-business (B2B) payments in U.S. and Canada (North America), falling to an all-time low of 33% since AFP began tracking this data in 2004, according to the 2022 AFP Digital Payments Survey, underwritten by J.P. Morgan.

B2B check payments have dropped 9 percentage points in North America since 2019. This is consistent with the steady deadline in check usage reported by organizations over the past two decades. Since 2004, check usage has fallen by over 40 percentage points.

Within North America, when paying major suppliers, the gap between paper and digital payments has widened to 13 percentage points, with 39 percent of organizations using ACH credits while 26 percent continue to use checks. This gap has increased by 11 percentage points since 2019, when the gap between ACH and checks was only two percentage points.

Additional key findings include:

  • Speed is critical for B2B payments. A majority of all survey respondents (54%) report that speed is the primary driver when choosing a payment method. And 62% of all survey respondents report that B2B transactions will benefit the most from faster/real-time payments.
  • A third of all survey respondents (33%) report they are unfamiliar with ISO 20022 — the global standard on which new payment systems rely.
  • Awareness of ISO 20022 is higher in regions outside of North America, with only 29% of respondents indicating that they are unfamiliar with the standard, compared to 36% in North America.

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