Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Welcome back to on the Fringe, brought to you by EPR Live. I am your host, Ann Larson. And today we're joined by Brandon Padgett and Paul Ranasett from Union bank and Trust to discuss why we should all stop sending checks. Welcome, Brandon and Paul. Can you introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about Union bank and trust me. Brandon, you want to go first?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Absolutely. So, Brandon Padgett, chief deposit officer at Union bank and Trust. So what does that mean? Think of how your cash moves, whether it's ACH wires, your standard operating accounts. That's what falls under my purview. And then I'll turn it over to Paul.
[00:00:42] Speaker C: Well, first off, Ann, thanks for having us on. My name is Paul Ranaset and I'm the assistant vice president for treasury management at Union bank and Trust. So kind of like Brandon mentioned, thinking anything, money movement, as well as securing your accounts within the banking industry, that's where I kind of step in and making sure that risk is evaluated with accounts as well as everyone's kind of up to date on what's going on with their accounts and making sure they're in the right spots.
[00:01:07] Speaker B: Absolutely. And here at Union bank and Trust, and we've been around 49 years, we were founded 49 years ago in March by 24 labor unions. So we are uniquely positioned as the only bank in the country that's 100% labor owned but multiple trade. Right. So we have building trades, we have non billing trades, we have the Minnesota AFL cio. We're just kind of a unicorn in that space. We were made by Taft Hartley funds, ERISA funds to protect and help them earn their best returns, make sure their, their money's not working against them in the space.
So yeah, we're kind of a unicorn out there. Lots of great labor banks, but our differentiator is 24 owners versus one singular union, our entity.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So you guys are going to have a great perspective for our clients since our clients are all contractors, associations, unions, third party administrators, all that stuff. And you guys know that all really well.
So the first thing I just want to clear up is that I think we all use EFT and ACH kind of interchangeably. So can you guys just define the two terms so that when we're using them in the conversation, people know what we're talking about?
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So eft, electronic funds transfer, people, to your point, use that interchangeably. ACH is automated clearinghouse. So it's a digital push of money. So it is an electronic funds transfer, but other things that are electronic. Could be online banking, bill, pay wires. Right. These are all electronic things.
Debit card is technically electronic if it's pinless. Right. You tap. Those are all electronic funds transfers. So EFT kind of encapsulates anything that's electronically, digitally, you know, virtually whatever you want to say, push. Whereas ACH is a typical one file, has maybe multiple payees in it. Right. So you might have one file with 20 different people that need to be paid or pulled, and it's going through to the automated clearinghouse at the Fed.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: So ACH is a form of eft.
It can be a pull or a push, and it always goes through this automated clearinghouse. Through the federal government?
[00:03:11] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: All right, so does it matter at all, like ACH versus a wire versus anything else? Does it matter for fraud or anything like that? Is an ACH safer than other types of eft?
[00:03:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So like in our instance, when it comes to Wyre, it's still one of the fastest ways to actually send money from one bank to another. It happens almost simultaneously. Right. When you send it off, within a few minutes, it's going to arrive at that bank. But it also, in the sense of the account, depends on how that bank accepts the wire, whatever it may be. In that sense, security wise, ACH is actually much safer just because in that case, when an ACH is sent off, there are ways to reverse the transaction, getting a hold of the banks to try and get that transaction pulled back, whatever it may be. In that case, when it comes to a wire, once that wire is sent, it's gone. That's one thing we talk about with our clients and being cautious, being sure that they have all the correct information, whether it's the bank's routing number, account information, the client details, just to be sure that we're protecting our clients. Because once that wire is sent out, I mean, we can do our due diligence to try and get that money back, but there is a likely chance that we don't.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: Gotcha. What we're going to talk about today is really about, like, not sending checks. And I have to say, we. About half of our clients still send us checks in the mail. Drives me nuts. I wish they wouldn't. But I also know that process, they're kind of stuck in that routine. So we're going to talk about why we don't want that, why it's not safe to send a check. And it's more expensive to send a check generally. And I know for our clients too, like, it's not just us Getting that money from our clients, but also all of our clients. So we have union collecting agents and Mika chapter collecting agents. We have TPAs who collect and send out a lot of money. So I imagine they all have to deal with checks sometimes. We do have a couple clients who have gone completely electronic, and I think it's really made their lives a lot better. It's tough to do that process change. So we'll talk a little bit about how they could go about it. But first, I want to talk about why is it that check. I mean, we've used checks for so long. Previous checks for. I mean, I've. The checks have been around for more longer than I have, for sure. Much longer. Much, much longer. Why aren't they safe or what? What has happened? Has something happened recently that's made them more problematic?
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Well, soapboxy a bit. Criminals, right? People have figured out it's pretty easy to wash a check, steal a check, move a check, get a check pushed through a bank because it's such a long reconciliation process on a check, right? Think back, and we were better today. But at my age, you wrote a check, it didn't come to your bank for 10 days, right? So essentially my bank was giving me credit, saying, hey, you're a good customer. We're gonna let you have this money. But they didn't know for eight to 10 days whether that check was any good. And it's not that much better. Today we have the check 21, which is digital clearinghouse at the bed, which still makes it faster, but it's not necessarily instant. It's not that quick. So people have figured out, I can go mailbox dive.
This is a nice neighborhood. I can dive in, I can steal all this mail. Take me 20 minutes to drive around a nice neighborhood. You know, you steal 500 pieces of mail, maybe you get one check in there, but then you can wash that check. You people have special printers. They can remake that check. And then typically, banks aren't finding them. Right? So if the check's written off us and you take it over to a smaller community bank, maybe it doesn't have all the technology outstate Minnesota. They can probably get that cash before the bank even knows it's bad. So it's easier to steal those checks, right? They're just. They're in the mail. And then all your information's on there. Your accounting number, your routing number, your check sequencing number, signature of the person that signed the check. Everything you need to replicate it is right there. You're giving the criminals the Ability to take your money well.
[00:06:58] Speaker C: And then to Brandon's point as well, like he had mentioned with those smaller community banks, stuff like that, that's also the training aspect of it too. Right.
Some of those banks don't have the proper procedures for training their employees what they're supposed to be looking for in the sense of checks and what needs to be fully completed from start to finish when they're running those transactions. Some of the times people run the transactions without waiting till finishing the, you know, total part in the system where it might throw up an error, might throw up something stating this check was on stop pay, whatever it may be in that case. And in that sense, we've already given the money out to the customers out the door and that's money that we've lost as a bank.
[00:07:36] Speaker A: So has this happened to you? Have you seen this happen?
[00:07:38] Speaker C: Yeah, it was just last week like we talked about. Ann, we do have the proper procedures and everything set in place.
Whether our clients are set up with positive pay, ACH alert, all that is connected and intertwined with our tellers up front. However, again, sometimes in those instances, people don't have those proper procedures set in place for positive pay or ACH alert.
And that's something where if a client or, you know, a customer, someone who is even a non customer, comes in, cashes a check, we still do our proper due diligence and checks and balances to be sure the check itself looks good. But next couple days go by, the customer sees that that checks entered or exited the account, it's been paid, that kind of thing. And then they're like, well, we didn't approve this. We don't remember signing off on this, that kind of thing. And us as a bank, we're like, well, you know, we still do our proper things, but we take it as we see it. So this is why we want to make sure we're having those conversations on that protection side of things.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: And Paul mentioned positive pay. If you have checks, have positive pay. So just quick high level. I know that's not what we're here to talk about, but it's a log of the checks, who they're written to date, stale date. And so let's say the criminal came to cash at Union bank and Trust. Check here at Union bank and Trust. Our system would instantly say, well, this name doesn't match and we decline it, right? Or if they did, like we said, they go to a small bank or even a big bank in this instance and cash it or deposit it when it hits us through that check 21 clearinghouse, we're going to send it back to that bank and it's be that bank's loss. It's not going to hit our client's account at all. And all banks offer positive pay. Some offer their own internal, some offer a third party. But we have it turned on for at least five checkpoints are on there up to nine where it says this is absolutely a good check.
They're not flawless though, right? There's still ways to get through the system. There's still ways. The only good way. We're the last industrialized country in the world that still operates on paper checks as heavily as we do. If you've been paying attention as of October 31, Paul, our Fed no longer will accept a check. You can't pay your taxes and check. It's gotta be the electronic like through their direct pay, through a direct pay, through your CPA or through wire.
Our Fed's not taking checks anymore. That should tell you where we're headed, thankfully, in my opinion, away from checks. But there's no other industrialized nation still processing checks. They're more expensive, they're less secure.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Yeah, tell me about the expense.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: So typically an ach an item might be $0.08 to a dollar depending on how the bank's set up. Depending on your account set up, a file might be $5 to $30.
And you can have as many different items inside of that file. So you're talking if you're paying hundreds of people, right, the file is 20 bucks, let's say, and your 10 cents per item, now you're $40 to send that out.
Now a typical check, one check to print it, mail it, have all the MICR, all the proper security on it, it's three to seven dollars. Well, we know 1400 dollars is more than $40 at the end of the day. So to pay 200 people at the high end, seven dollars per check, it'd be 1400 bucks.
Well, to pay that many people at 10 cents plus a file fee, I'm going high and low. I understand I'm talking on both sides here. But even if it's a buck, right, it's $220 versus $1,400 at administrative cost. So you're still so much cheaper.
[00:11:03] Speaker C: The thing on top of that, maybe putting the cart in front of the horse a little bit, but in the sense of costs and everything, when that does happen, the sense of fraudulent activity unchecks now you're also thinking of the manpower that you have to pay for your employees to go in, calling these banks, making sure that all the proper agreements and everything are filled out to send to those banks to request funds back, whatever it may be. Sometimes it may take a few days and sometimes it takes months to hear anything. Responses, all that. So even here, look at it from every end. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: I feel like from our company standpoint, we have to have a mailbox. Like, we have a checker. You know, I used to go every day. I used. I mean, I. This used to be my job for many years. Now I try to go at least a couple times a week. And then we're going all that, just opening it up and then, like, making sure. And then we have to make sure they have the invoice number. And I mean, all of this work, it just takes so much time. I did it this morning when I got some checks, deposited them and found them. You know, we had to have a locked drawer where we get the other checks, and they have to match them. And it's so annoying. Like, it's so. It's like something I would love to get rid of because it's just so tedious and it doesn't. And like, sometimes they're wrong, and then you spend all this time trying to reconcile it or sometimes people. It's a lot.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: For our clients, like in our system, the, you know, they get checks and they have to put in the checks, and it's just much, much harder than just with an electronic payment. If they use our ACH system, it's like it has to match. It's always going to match. You click like one button and it's done. Instead of like, trying to break out this check that maybe a contractor wrote for the covered multiple agreements and lots of different, you know, lots of different benefits. So then they have to figure out how that all breaks down. And it's just. It's so much more work.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: Yeah. And think about, like, I think about the vacation funds, right. At some of these unions, they might cut 4800 vacation fund checks in December. Well, you're going to get a good percentage. 5% of those. Those people in the field go, well, I'm gonna hold onto this until the summer because I don't want it in my account. We're gonna use it for family vacation. I'm holding it. Well, now you're trying to reconcile your books, but you got, you know, you sent $10 million out in vacation funds. You got $800,000. It's unreconciled because people are just holding it which is technically they're right. But if you do ach, you go completely ach. Well, they push it. They gotta get a savings account. It's on them, right? It's not on the administrator, it's not on the TPA to try to reconcile. Keep up with it, the money's out, books are reconciled, DOL's happy when they audit you. You're not trying to explain where they're at. It's on the user, right? We're all adults. If you're working at a union, you're working for a union act contractor. You're a grown up, here's your money, figure out how to save it type of thing. It's not on the TPA or the administrator to make sure you save that money, if that makes sense.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Yeah, well, tell me a little bit more. You mentioned auditing. Tell me about how checks make it hard to audit or electronic payments make it easier.
[00:13:59] Speaker B: Electronic payments make it easier because it's at the tip of whether you're in house or you have a tpa. It's right at the tip of your fingers. Those, all those ACH files went out the whole quarter, so they need the last three quarters. Well, those are all done. They're all fully reconciled immediately as soon as it goes out and the reports are at the tip of your finger. So you just go on, boom, email them to the dol, hand them over, however they're doing it. You know, a lot of our clients hire third party auditors to come in to make sure.
Well then you can just drop them in. Like for us when we get audited, we have a shared online like the cloud, right? We drop them in there and our auditors have it, we have it, and it's just done. Our hands are done. Whereas checks again, let's say you write a thousand checks and a hundred people don't cash them. They're not reconciled on the back end. So then you're explaining. Or sometimes they might say, well, this is a big check, so I gotta go get an answer. Where's it at? It's just more work. And if we get nothing out of this today, checks are just more work and more expensive.
[00:14:53] Speaker A: So do you have any other like real world check fraud scenarios you want to share?
[00:15:00] Speaker B: In my 23 years in financial industry, we had a union this year. Somehow it took seven months, but they got their money back. It wasn't a little money, it wasn't a $200 check. I think it was 43,000 Paul's that sound right? It's a Big check, right? And this isn't a major local, so $43. There's some locals that'd be like, nah, it's a rounding error. This is not. Most locals are that way. Right? Most locals are a couple hundred to a thousand people. It matters. $43,000 is a huge deal. And it was to this local and they got very lucky. We stayed on it. I don't want to take credit, Paul. And then mostly our ops team. Debbie would not leave the Fed alone. And finally Deb bank returned it.
Miracle of God, I guess. I don't know, I had never seen it. But most banks, rightfully so, aren't going to weekly follow up the Fed and pester them and squeaky wheel and Most admins or TPAs don't have the time to be that squeaky wheel, follow up with the Fed. You know, Debbie just said a recurring email that blasted out every week which was smart to get to them. So they're like hey, where's this at? But you know, we've seen just last year alone I think it was $113,000 in paper loss from just two unions.
Just two. And we had more paper loss, but nothing on that scale. But once you lose a check, once that check is washed, if you didn't have positive pay, it's just gone. It's just money out of the contractor's pocket or it's money out of the member's pocket. Whose ever pocket it is, it's just gone. It's in the ether. There's no way in what a lot of people do, right? You get those wash checks. Well this checks from Minnesota, simple for us. You drive across the border 20 minutes to Wisconsin. Well, it's a Minnesota check. So Wisconsin sheriff's not gonna do anything about it. The crime is in Wisconsin. So the Minnesota people are gonna do anything about it. And you can' to the FDIC because it's under, I forget the threshold. $100,000. It's not a federal crime.
[00:16:55] Speaker A: $99,000, right.
[00:16:57] Speaker B: So it's not a federal crime. So the Fed's not going to do anything about it. These criminals aren't, I want to say they're not stupid, but they're criminals. So they're a lot more sophisticated than you think. They understand exactly what they're doing.
Nobody's going to cross that border. And you know, we could throw a baseball to the border of Wisconsin from here. And a lot of places are like that.
[00:17:15] Speaker C: Well, and then it's just like Brandon was saying too. I mean we see now why Fed is changing, you know, the way they stand on checks. It's because when Covid hit and they were sending out all these stimulus checks and everything like that, I mean that was the biggest time for fraud, that was the biggest issue. They were sending out checks to, you know, hundreds of millions of people almost and it was just something they couldn't get a hold of. Obviously once those checks were out, set in the mail, it's at that point free grab for anyone. So it's something they realize where if they are sending ACHS doing electronic transfers, it's a lot more secure and easier to pull back if they find an issue or a problem.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense.
So how do we get people to change? This is what I really want to hear.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: I will tee it up, but Paul's the expert. But you know, if you're a business manager, a tpa, you're, you're an in house admin, you're a lawyer listening to this, it's just getting somebody to sit down with their banking professional, show them the exact cost, show them the risk. You know, a lot of times it's, we hear this a ton in the union space. Well, we've always done it that way. I can use my dad's example. He's a 45 year IBW electrician out of Iowa.
They weren't doing the same things when he retired last year in 2024 that they were doing in 19. I can't even do the math. 1979, it's just not the same. Right. So just always done it that way is not an excuse. Whether you're a nurse, a doctor, an electrician, a garbage man, you know, that's not a, not a way to go about it. But I'll let Paul kind of dig deeper into it.
[00:18:43] Speaker C: The biggest thing for us and a lot of times luckily enough here within the past year, Brandon's done great and really preaching our story and everything to these unions and getting them over to us to really be a part of their movement. The biggest thing for me is that I want to be sure that all of these business managers, treasurers, everything like that understand our products and what we do have to offer. A lot of the banks business will come in, they'll open up their accounts and it's a, hey, see you later.
That's not who we are. For me I really built up on the treasury management side as well as our retail side is when those business accounts are open to do that handoff to us so we can have that in depth conversation. A really Good training piece so they can understand their online banking roles, what they have for products that they can use through the bank. And just knowing that with me and my department is that whenever there's any questions related to achievements, wire anything to protect themselves from fraudulent activity, they're more than welcome to always reach out. And in continuing that training process too, we're building up programs to be able to set trainings out throughout the year so any clients of ours can come in, sit down with us, learn more about those products and just knowing that they're secure in that sense of that financial aspect so we can actually get them to feel more comfortable in talking about those products.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Selfless plug here. And didn't mean it to be salesy but. Www.ubtmn.com we offer free training videos. They're out there. There's also click through. So even if you don't bank with us, you never call us. Go to our website.
You'll be able to live click through and work through ach files, see how it works, see how the money moves. And our system is not unique. Right. All banks have the same systems. It might look different visually, but if they want a chance to go out and learn, they can go right to our website. There's walkthrough videos and then there's act click through demos for people to work on. So we'd love to have you as a client, that'd be wonderful. But if you just want to learn, we offer those tools for you too.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: That's great.
Yeah. So what I sometimes see from our clients, I think, and I don't know if this is true of everybody and I'm sure it's not, but that sort of, this is the way we've always done it. They seem to in some cases have like a whole stack of checks that they only kind of process a couple times a month and they want two people to sign it. And I think there's a belief in that process.
There shouldn't be a good process.
But like, what do you say to somebody who comes to you with that and you're like, like, how can they. Because if they still want somebody to like sign off on the payment or something like that, is there a way that you recommend them to do?
[00:21:25] Speaker B: We have a few people that would do the double signature still, but the Fed doesn't recognize dual authentication signatures anymore. So if there's a signature on it, it's digital, it's going to go through. A lot of people don't understand this anymore. Banks don't look at every check. It's not the 80s, there's again, check 21. If you want to Google that, you can understand what that is about. But we scan a check here, we submit that check digitally.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Our.
[00:21:48] Speaker B: I don't know, I can't speak for our bank. We do it every hour. Our system dumps to the Fed every hour, those images. And then the Fed stacks a bunch of images. Say we have three checks to Wells Fargo. Well, boom, sends those off in one thing. And requests from Wells Fargo make it easy. 20 grand. We need 20 grand to union bank and Trust from Wells Fargo. So that could, that's the total of the three checks combined is $20,000. They just send us $20,000.
They don't say, this is the 13 for this, this is the 4 for this, and this is the 3 for that. It's just chunked, there's not on it that way when it hits the Fed. That's why the positive pay for us is a big deal. Because when it comes this way, when we see that we do get the image digitally hits our positive pay. So there's no human interaction.
And I don't know, fintech is a beautiful thing.
It rejects it for us because it's a digital system. You got to combat it digitally. You're not going to combat it with dual authentication signatures or I mailed it in a triple secret envelope. None of that works. ACH works, that's why we're here.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: Well, and then two, Brandon's point on that too, as you mentioned, but dual signatures on checks and stuff, it really doesn't pick it up. And then like with ACH side of things. Now, not all banks do this, but our bank does specifically, is that we always have one initiator, one approver. That way we're getting that dual verification and making sure that still everything is properly typed out, filled out, whatever it may be in that case. So that one person who will initiate puts everything in, and then someone will also come in and just double check their work before actually sending it or approving it.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah, and I would suggest to anybody, if your bank's not doing that, or if you are for some reason, I think all banks, I could say I know all banks have the capability to do that as an administrator, tpa, a business manager, financial sector, whatever, Contractor, Contractors association insists that that gets turned on at your bank.
So I go in and I send it. It doesn't go anywhere until Paul approves it. And then again back to your dol, it sees Brandon's the initiator.
Paul's the approver. Now we're covered, right? We didn't do anything that wasn't out of our fiduciary responsibility.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I think I've always heard that, you know, having at least two pairs of eyeballs on financial stuff is important.
And that also seems like it would reduce the chance that, like you get a fraudster calling you up and saying, you need to send me this money right away. You know, like the panic AI call, then maybe somebody does initiate it, but then that approver is like, what it. Like, what is this?
[00:24:14] Speaker C: Well, and then the big thing too, there. And like you had mentioned with fraud and everything like that, when these ACH files get sent off, they're sent off electronically to the other bank. They'll actually relay back to us almost that same day if anything was typed in wrong, whether it was routing number names on the payee portion of it, whatever. In that sense, to be able to actually correct those reaching out to our clients and knowing who we have to contact initially to get those fixed and then getting that sent out to the proper people without any of that lag time that a check would definitely potentially give up.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: Yes, definitely. So what then? If somebody wants to move off of checks, listening to this conversation, they're like, what do I do first?
[00:24:58] Speaker B: Contact your relationship manager. Right? So at your bank, so some people call their banker, some people call them Steve, whatever. Who's the person you go to at your local institution? Right here, if you called me, I'd put you in touch with Paul. But we have peers obviously across the country, great bankers. But that's your first step, get a demo, understand it, sit down with your banker and have them show you that live demo. See how simple it is. You know, a lot of people think, well, it's going to be all this work. Well, really, once you set your files, you may need to tweak, pay, you know, the dollar amounts most of our locals have set in, our councils have set files.
They're going to be this. You got to go in and change again some dollar amounts. But it's pretty easy. One person does it, next person approves it. Boom. It's digitally downloaded right from your desktop.
Crazy as people think it is. It's. It's very simple. You got to do the same thing to have checks printed, right? If you want to have checks printed, you got to go put all that same exact information in there just for it all to be printed out to be given to criminals.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Our system is like similar in that the setup is the hardest part, but then Once it's set up, it's very straightforward. And we always ask our clients if they want to set up ach. It's a. It's an ACH pull. So we create NACHA files. NACHA is the file that goes to. Has ACH in the middle. It's a file that goes with achs, and it initiates a pull from the accounts that have, you know, have opted in to pay that way. We always ask our clients to talk to their treasury person. So that. That would be Paul at their bank. Yeah, presumably. Or somebody like Paul who knows this stuff. Not everybody knows at the bank. We found the treasury people are the ones who know all about ach and they know how to set everything up. And they know what your bank would need, what Union bank and Trust would need in that file in order to process it. It's worked out really, really well.
[00:26:50] Speaker B: Yep. So NACHA is the National Automated Clearinghouse Association. Right. They set the standards.
So all the banks talk to each other the same way. So, like, we don't create our own standard. And then Bridgewater does this or bank of America does that. It's. Here's the standard files created by the association. So all the banks can talk to each other.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Yeah. I would say they still like to be a little bit different, but it's similar.
[00:27:14] Speaker B: It's very.
[00:27:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: There's the basic information, and then they all have their little.
[00:27:18] Speaker C: Their little tweaks, little nuances.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Versus.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Yeah. But it isn't a complicated term. Okay, so what is your biggest piece of advice if people don't want to move for. I hate to even ask this question. If people just don't want to move from checks and they just refuse to do it, what should they. What's the. What's something that they can do to just make checks safer?
[00:27:39] Speaker B: Positive pay. And talked on a little bit earlier. That's about the only way. It's still not flawless, but at least typically with positive pay, if something gets through, your bank is liable versus the local or the contractor or the association.
Yeah.
[00:27:53] Speaker C: With positive pay, it's the same thing, too. When those checks come through, you'll be able to see those checks and decisions and everything like that, but that person also has to go in and decision whether to approve or accept those checks to be sent off.
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:28:05] Speaker C: So again, there's still that authentication portion to be sure that everyone's getting their side of things covered prior to it actually being either declined or approved.
[00:28:14] Speaker B: Now I've, you know, 20 years plus professional experience, get ahead of it and this is anything in life you don't want to be forced into it because when you're forced into it, it's a fire drill. We've already seen the Fed say we're no longer taking checks. I don't have a crystal ball by any means, obviously. But again, the last industrialized country to take paper checks, we're not far from them saying we're not going to process paper checks either because our paper checks are still processed technically by the Fed. Right. The fdic, all the low. Like we have the Minneapolis fed here, St. Louis, Chicago. I can't remember how many Feds there are, but the Fed still processes all our checks. They're not third party processed. So if they won't receive checks and no other countries that we consider peers are using checks, how long do you think we are still going to be able to process checks in the US? I mean, could be five years, could be 10. I really don't know. But you're better off getting ahead of it, saving money by not writing checks, being more secure by not writing checks and also not having to do a fire drill. Whenever the Fed says we don't process.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: Them anymore, yeah, we're done.
[00:29:18] Speaker B: We're done where it's coming. Right. They already don't take them. That happened this year. That's not like this crazy far off thing. It's now Fed doesn't take checks. So why do they, why are they going to want to keep processing them?
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah, get ahead of it. I love that our clients aren't so into that.
[00:29:35] Speaker B: I'm going to get beat up by somebody that listens to this. I already have her face in my head. But what you typically have is an office manager, an admin, that's just like, I don't want to change. And they've been there for 20 years and the financial secretary or the, you know, the, the board of trustees is going, I don't want to make Jenny mad.
I can't. I don't want to make, I don't want to make Jim mad. So honestly, where we see people don't move to ACH more often than not is one office person just says no, Paul, you've been with us for a while now. You, that's typically their reason for not going. Ach.
[00:30:08] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean the biggest thing right now is a lot of them are so stuck in their ways and we understand that, you know, I mean there's business managers or there's secretaries who've been in that same for years and, and they just, it's easy to do it that same way again and again. But it's like you also need to understand us as a bank and in the roles we're in. We're not here to make your lives harder. We're here to make your lives as easy in that financial side of things as possible. And it's not like we're here to hold your hand, but we're here to train you and coach you whatever you need for questions answered in that financial side of things. And if you need to sit down with us and talk about that process, we're more than happy to do it.
[00:30:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:47] Speaker C: 100%. Awesome.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: Well, that's it for this episode of on the Fringe. Thank you so much, Brandon and Paul, for joining me. I loved this conversation. And if anybody listening is still relying on paper checks, now is the time to rethink your process and work on this and change it because you can do it and it's going to be better. Thanks for listening.
