Businesses Were Told to Stop Writing Checks. They Wrote More of Them Instead. | ICONUS TECH

For a few years now, the advice to businesses has been consistent: stop writing checks. Trade groups say it. Consumer coverage says it. The association that runs the ACH network has said it outright, an executive there put it plainly in 2025: check payments should be disappearing. The reasoning is straightforward. A check carries the account and routing numbers a criminal needs, it travels through the mail where it can be intercepted, and check fraud has climbed for years running.

Businesses heard the advice. Then they used more checks, not fewer. A 2026 survey from the Association for Financial Professionals found 91 percent of organizations were still using checks, up from 75 percent the year before, even as roughly two out of three respondents said they had been hit by check fraud in that same period.

That is not businesses ignoring good advice. It is businesses running into something the advice does not account for: for a real share of what a business actually needs to pay, a check is still the only tool that does the whole job.

What a Check Still Does That Nothing Else Does Yet

The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta looked at why checks persist, and the reasons have nothing to do with nostalgia. A check carries remittance data, the invoice number, the PO number, the line-item detail, printed on the document itself, so the business receiving it can match the payment to the right invoice without anyone re-entering anything by hand. An ACH transfer often lands as a number and a routing code with no attached detail at all. A January 2026 report on nonprofit payments found this gap is a leading reason organizations keep a check-based workflow running: a $500 gift that arrives by transfer with no note attached leaves staff trying to work backward to figure out which appeal, which donor, or which campaign it belongs to. The same report pointed to a second, more basic problem: electronic payment systems differ from payer to payer, while a check is one of the only formats an organization can count on looking the same no matter who sends it, a real issue for larger nonprofits routing payments to the correct department internally.

For small businesses specifically, the Atlanta Fed found checks still cover the large majority of the smallest firms: close to 80 percent of businesses under $1 million in revenue use them, and 83 percent of businesses under $10 million do, the highest share of any size segment measured. Contractors and subcontractors sit squarely inside that range. Construction has traditionally run its subcontractor and supplier payments on paper checks and one-off bank transfers, and even the software vendors trying to move the industry toward embedded ACH describe the current process as fragmented rather than obsolete, pointing to a multibillion-dollar drag from slow, inconsistent payment cycles rather than to checks specifically as the culprit.

There is a plainer reason too. A check gives a small business a few days of float between writing it and having it clear, which for a firm managing a tight cash cycle can be the difference between making payroll on time and not. And a second signature on the check, someone writes it, someone else signs it, remains one of the more effective manual controls a small operation has, at a cost of nothing beyond the habit of doing it.

What Gets Lost If You Just Stop

None of this means the fraud numbers are wrong. They are not. But the organizations actually weighing a full switch away from checks run into real costs on the other side of that decision, not just the sticker price of new software.

Losing remittance data is the first one, and it shows up in more than one report independently: electronic transfers routinely arrive without the invoice or gift detail that makes a check self-explanatory, turning a one-step match into a manual research project, and larger organizations with multiple departments can struggle to route an incoming electronic payment to the correct unit at all.

The float disappears too. For a business managing a tight cash cycle, the days between writing a check and having it clear function as short, interest-free financing. Move to instant electronic settlement and that cushion is gone.

And the fraud does not disappear, it changes shape. The same 2026 survey that found 91 percent of organizations still using checks also found 79 percent had experienced actual or attempted payment fraud of some kind that year, checks included but far from the whole picture. Business email compromise and unauthorized electronic debits initiated with banking details are climbing in the same window checks are supposedly on their way out.

The Fix Was Never “Stop”

None of these organizations were victims of checks existing. They were victims of nobody, on either end of the payment, having a fast way to confirm a specific check was the one that was actually written before the money moved.

That is fixable without asking a nonprofit to give up remittance data it depends on, or a subcontractor to give up the float that gets payroll made on time. If you write checks, ICONUS registers a secure verification record for each one automatically, free to start, so it can be confirmed at any ICONUS-enabled bank before it is accepted. If you receive them, that same record is what gets checked before the money is released. Nobody has to change how they pay or get paid to close the gap that was actually causing the losses.

If you want to see how that works, we’re at iconustech.com.

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ICONUS is a check verification registry. Verification is active at ICONUS-enabled financial institutions. Learn more at iconustech.com/how-it-works.

Sources: Association for Financial Professionals, 2026 Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report, as covered by Nacha, “AFP Survey: Businesses May Be Misled on Risks of Check Fraud,” April 2025; Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, “Why Do Businesses Still Use Paper Checks?,” Take On Payments, January 12, 2026; Chariot, “All Checks, No Balance: A Report on the State of Check Payments to Nonprofits,” January 20, 2026; Entrepreneur, “Why This Old-School Payment Method Still Dominates Small Business, and How It Gives Owners an Edge,” April 2, 2026; Buildertrend, construction payments press coverage, February 2026.

#Finance #Payments #CheckFraud