Most major banks offer a service called 'bill pay' which does this for free, directly from your checking account. Your bank first tries to pay the receiver electronically if they are in the banks network (most utility or other major companies would likely be in-network), and if they aren't in network or if they are just a person and not a company, then the service sends them a physical check in the mail.
Is this a thing? In every country I've lived in, cheques are not only universally hated by landlords and tenants, but all banks offer recurring payments available online (no matter whether the payee is "in the network", you just need the account number and some other piece of data depending on the country). My rent has been paid automatically ever since I was old enough to have a rent, and I never paid a cent for the service of "paying my rent".
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure the service is great... what is making me laugh is the fact that it's even needed. And by "making me laugh" I mean "horrifies me".
Have you lived in the USA? Checks are, as far as I can tell, still ubiquitous for rent payments here, and I've always used my bank's online bill pay feature for that. The same is true for utilities, although recently more of those have started supporting recurring credit card payments online.
To people in Europe (no idea if grandparent belongs to these), mailing around checks is just a ludicruous idea.
You whip out your strong-authentication-of-the-day device, do the magic bellydance (i.e., enter some numbers into that device, or scan something on the screen) and whoop, you just transfered a sum of money. To someone in a different European (SEPA) country. Without paying anything (except if you live in Italy and have a greedy bank). With the money coming in within two business days at their side.
And of course you have an option to perform monthly payments that way. Some landlords put it in the rent contract that the tenant has to use this method.
France was one of the last country to abandon checks. Why? Because everything is more efficient when it's electronic, and there is less forgery. (You can still send a wire transform via mail with a forged signature, but with these, you can usually go to the recipient and give them a hard time, which is harder with a check someone cashed out two days ago).
I have indeed lived in europe and what sounds ludicrous to me is that people not only have to deal with this but accept it as the norm. What the hell do landlords get out of this? The joy of having to run to the bank every xth of the month?
I don't know about you but my bank is more like a public toilet than a bakery. I wouldn't go there unless there was an emergency, and even if there was I'd consider a dark alley over it.
(brought to you by the Department of drawn out metaphors)
Check is the standard method of paying rent in the US. Many apartments are getting onboard with online rent payments, but it's still not really standard. My last apartment was check-only. My current apartment complex has online payment, but there's a ton of surcharges (payment collection fee, convenience fee, etc.) adding up to about $50 if you pay online.
Hilarious. Payment collection fee for ... something that is easier and doesn't require collection? Than a cheque, which does require both collection and deposit, and isn't immediate, and, and ...
This sounds even more pathetic than those sad businesses having "handling fee" surcharges for getting your bills online. As if there was actually a secretary typing all those numbers into excel and uploading them to the website manually.
I have never heard of a landlord in the US that does not accept checks. Many only accept checks (or probably cash if you offered it), particularly non-corporate landlords.
My current (corporate) landlord accepts checks or direct deposit, but not credit or debit.
I'm 40, have always lived in the US, and have never paid my rent in a way other than check. To take it even farther, I'm pretty sure I've written fewer than 100 checks in my entire life that weren't rent checks.
They allow electronic payments for my apartment, but honestly in the US, that's very rare. Here, a check is the most acceptable way to pay for their mortgage/rent. Many people prefer it due a) A lack of an existing process to accept them (haven't setup through their bank yet) and b) A prevailing distrust of computers and the internet in general.
There are erroneous deductions that can happen if you don't keep an eye on automatic payments and there are horror stories of overbillings, overdrafts etc... so that scares away some people too.
It really feels like a company injecting themselves into a workflow where there are already totally usable alternatives. Plus they get themselves a handy pool of potential clients of all the landlords they send checks to.
I love this kind of service - it allows me to pay my bills relatively automatically without giving the payee any of my banking information[1]. The fact that the paper check is a common interface makes this very easy (from my perspective). Just fill in a few fields and the bank (and the business I am paying) take care of the rest.
It's a push model for paying, vs a pull (where you set up auto-deduct).
[1] ok, yeah, it's right there on the check, but I get to sign off on the exact amount of the transaction.
We're working on the ability to use your successful rent payments to contribute to your credit score, which is a huge benefit for folks like me who have no established credit in the US (or bad credit).
It costs 3.25%, or $74.25 for the example of $2300. So if you're looking to just rack up "reward points", you'd be best pumping through a payment processor that takes a smaller cut.
$5/month for debit is more reasonable, but my bank will mail my rent check for free.
Debit card is 0.22 + 0.05% transactions and this is only for large banks, the fee is set by law with the Durbin Amendment . Smaller banks aren't covered by the amendment and fees are higher, think the going rate is 1.65% and 0.15.
$2000 rent fees range $1.22 to $30. Think $5 is reasonable.
FYI transaction costs are a percentage of the total charge. Plus interchange and all that crap. Without looking too far into this, I'm pretty sure debit transaction fees are ~1% which would be about $20 for my $2,000 rent.
"Overall, signature debit networks charged substantially higher fees, on a per-transaction basis (12.5 cents), than did PIN debit networks (5.7 cents), and the difference between these fees on a per-transaction basis widened in 2012."
"The Board's Regulation II provides that an issuer subject to the interchange fee standard (a covered issuer) may not receive an interchange fee that exceeds 21 cents plus 0.05 percent multiplied by the value of the transaction, plus a 1-cent fraud-prevention adjustment, if eligible. Transactions made using certain reloadable general-use prepaid cards and debit cards issued pursuant to government-administered payment programs are exempt from the interchange fee standard, even if the card is issued by a covered issuer."
A lot of people find it's important to pay on a credit card especially if you're living month to month, or if you can afford to pay the fees you can get decent status with your card company.
You're totally right though, $4.95/mo is more likely to happen (or send through your bank). We have some good value add over the bank because we're in the process of letting you build your credit history with successully paid rent payments - something the banks don't offer.
Sometimes your paycheck doesn't arrive on time to pay your rent, and paying on a credit card to absorb the fee temporarily is a viable option for some people. Paying with a credit card also isn't a requirement...just an option :)
Or get a line of credit. Or overdraft protection. Or in the worst case just take out a cash advance on your credit card for a few days.
3.25% off the top just to pay your rent is insane.
Can you give some detail on how your merchant account is categorized? It looks like your product is a "cash equivalent" and probably not eligible for rewards points.
Good point. This app would make more sense with bitcoin in order to avoid the fees, and would have several benefits over paying rent online through a bank (or over having to write a check by hand and mail it in). Some examples:
1) Instead of waiting 3 days for a bank transfer to clear (or for a check to go through the mail), you could pay your rent through an app like this in seconds using bitcoin (and not pay 3% for the convenience of instant payment).
2) If you're working remotely in a different country then you could use this app with bitcoin to pay neither credit card fees nor SWIFT fees for international bank transfers.
3) If you're an early adopter and your bitcoin appreciate over time you'd effectively be paying tomorrows rent with a big percentage discount with todays BTC purchases if you could use this app with bitcoin.
Dwolla might be a good alternative payment system for the app to support also, with a $0.25 processing fee for the transfer part of the fee.
Online billpay mailing a check for no fee still wins though.
As many other comments have pointed out almost everyone with a debit card already has a free bill pay option from their bank. Thus the only real market for this is paying by credit card. Spiraling debt? Chargebacks? This is going to end badly.
My apartment building uses Yapstone's RentPayment.com, which charges me a flat $24.95 fee to use my credit card. I wonder what they're doing to get around processor fees that RadPad isn't.
If I make an assumption of why using checks is still common in the US, it's for a few reasons stated here.
1. NO FEES. There are no fees associated with checks, unless you post your mail with a stamp. Otherwise, it's the most cost effective way even if it's classical.
2. Credit card transactions means landlord loses ~2.9% on every transaction. This adds up over time and rent prices go up.
3. Auto bill pay means getting someone's bank account number, which requires complete trust. Yes, contracts can be signed and such but so many people do not use contracts if they live with roommates. In California, my experience of signing a legitimate contract just to live with other roommates (usually plural) is basically zero. The ones who require it are large corporations, apartment complex owners who do background checks (again, which I've never had) and stingy landlords.
4. Many owners still use legacy systems which are not automated to keep track of transactions, thus having physical and tangible check or cash makes it easier for them to keep track of this. We don't have common, online repository set up for these small-time complex owners to move to. They're used to the way they do things and won't change.
Overall, it's more cost-effective to collect checks, continue using legacy system and avoid transaction fees by using checks or even cash.
Oh, one other thing, if you have an American bank account and want to send money for free, try Chase QuickPay. You don't even need a Chase bank account to do this!
http://chase.com/quickpay
I try to root for the small guys to succeed. After watching that video I almost hope for a fail, and if that personifies the people behind the business, I can only imagine it certainly will.
The use of checks baffles me. I'm 32 and have lived my life in Australia and Canada, have never had a check book and never needed/wanted one.
To pay rent, bills, send money to friends/family and other similar items, I put a name and bank account number into my internet banking and setup a scheduled transfer every month. It's free, and it works irrelevant of who is with what bank.
That's a great question. Only one of my four landlords accepted electronic payments. The others wanted checks. One of those, tragically, demanded that the monthly rent check be dropped into his real estate office's mailbox. shudder
Since buying a house, I now only write checks to my church. Everything else (mortgage, insurances, cell phone bill, utilities, internet) is either automated by systems owned by the provider, or the old-skool, bank-mails-a-check-to-the-inlaws-to-pay-the-wife's-phone-bill-each-month method.
It does, but it seems a lot of folks don't know about it...
The money is either transfered directly from the bank, or even mailed on your behalf as a physical check for those merchants who aren't set up to accept transfers like that. In either case, it's not necessary for you - the bill-payer- to write checks.
I noticed that when I lived in Canada, banks tend to pick up on technology pretty quickly compared to the US. I assumed that was because the Canadian banking industry is dominated by 5 (or is it 6) massive banks while the US has a few massive banks, then tons of smaller regional banks.
When a bank offers something new in Canada, the rest follow suit pretty quickly or they lose customers. In the US there just isn't the same competitive pressures. Or so my theory goes.
The US does have this. I go online to my bank, put in a name and address, and they send the money. I've even scheduled it to send automatically every month.
This has been my experience as well, although there is usually a nominal (around $5) fee for transferring from one bank to another. Bank of America transfers are free to another BoA customer. Online bill pay, which falls back to checks if necessary (but doesn't require the payer to deal with checks), is free through BoA.
Not really. I tried send someone a large sum recently and my options were 3rd party payment sites (Paypal, Google Wallet etc), cash, or check. Direct transfers (ACH) do exist, but it's difficult to set up and so is usually between accounts owned by one person (bank<->bank, bank<->Paypal). Plus it takes 3-5 business days. I ended handing over a cashier's check.
[1]https://www.bankofamerica.com/onlinebanking/online-bill-pay....
[2]https://www.chase.com/online-banking/online-bill-pay
[3]https://www.wellsfargo.com/online-banking/bill-pay/