That smart phone in your pocket can now help save time on a common banking transaction that nobody likes to drive to the bank or credit union to do!
It’s been three years since USAA developed a groundbreaking app that allowed you to do deposits into your account electronically. I’ve been using a similar app from Charles Schwab for a year.
Here’s how this idea works: I get check that I want to deposit into my Schwab One — their equivalent of a checking account. So I take out my smart phone, sign into their app, take a picture of the front of the check, take a picture of the back and hit a command button. Then it deposits it for me. Once I get the confirmation that it’s been deposited, Schwab asks me to destroy the paper check.
This system was kind of buggy at first, but now it works very well.
More and more credit unions and banks are going to allow you to do this kind of electronic deposit. It beats going to the drive through or inside to the tellers to a make a deposit. You reduce the possibility of problems with checks getting lost and you can save a lot of time.
Yet The Sacramento Bee reports that few people have adopted this as habit. They talk about a credit union with 600,000 members. Roughly 10% have enrolled in mobile banking. But of that number, only 12,000 use the electronic deposit function. For some reason, people don’t really trust this.
Let me tell you, electronic deposit on your smart phone is safer than the traditional way of depositing and it sure is less hassle. If this is available to you, check it out.
