The End of Check Cashers?
Last week at the Sage Summit in Chicago, Sage announced they would be offering a service to employers in conjunction with Visa. Companies can now choose to pay their employees through debit cards instead of printing checks, and the PayCards, as they're known, integrates directly with payroll software. It's certainly an interesting idea, especially when you look at the benefits to both employees and the companies they work for.
The program is aimed at people without bank accounts (which some estimates put as high as 25 percent of Americans). Many of these people pay high fees to check-cashing stores or banks they're unaffiliated with just to access their pay. For them the benefits are obvious, but employees can also choose to have a certain percentage of their weekly pay put on a debit card that they can give to a child in college, an elderly parent, or family overseas. Since it's a Visa card, all purchases can be tracked online so that people can see how they're spending their money and learn how to manage it.
For employers, printing checks can be costly (not to mention the environmental impact of the paper). It can also be inconvenient for companies where most employees take advantage of direct deposit, and the few that don't take up much of payroll's time. Essentially a debit card eliminates the need to offer the option of paper checks at all.
Do you think your company would ever offer the option of being paid by debit card? Is it something you would encourage your employees to sign up for? Innovative uses for debit cards are growing as we more toward more electronic commerce, phasing out cash and checks, but is that what employees (or customers as well) want?
