Introduction
Even as digital payments dominate worldwide, bank checks remain surprisingly common in the US payment system. In 2021, Americans wrote an estimated 11.2 billion checks, even as mobile wallet payments surpassed them in transaction volume (Federal Reserve, 2024). The trend is shifting, surveys show consumers are steadily reducing their use of paper methods like cash and checks, but the decline is gradual, and checks still represent billions of transactions annually (Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, 2024; Federal Reserve Services, 2025).
This persistence creates a unique challenge: how can banks, businesses, and developers efficiently capture and process data from checks without the cost and delays of manual entry? . Traditional OCR tools don’t handle check-specific elements well – think MICR encoding, handwritten amounts, or fraud detection.
I experienced this first-hand when I moved to San Mateo. My property manager required physical checks for both rent and the security deposit, no digital transfers, no apps. Coming from a country where checks had been phased out, it felt outdated. But what stood out was how the company processed them: using Veryfi’s mobile app to instantly extract routing numbers, account numbers, amounts, and payee details, then push that structured data into their accounting system. What would normally take days was done in minutes.
1. The Check Usage Landscape: Why Checks Still Matter
Despite the growth of digital payments, checks remain deeply embedded in North American financial workflows. In the United States, the Federal Reserve reported that checks still accounted for 5.1% of all cashless payments as recently as 2021. In Canada, adoption of digital payment methods has accelerated, but checks continue to play an important role in business-to-business transactions and certain financial services.
Why do checks persist?
- Established Infrastructure: Decades of investment in clearing networks keep them reliable.
- B2B Payments: Roughly one in five supplier payments globally are still made by check, with North America among the highest users.
- Demographics & Trust: Some industries and customers continue to prefer paper records.
- Cost & Simplicity: For some high-value B2B payments, checks may offer lower fees and fewer intermediaries than card or wire transfers.
For banks, credit unions, and financial service providers, this persistence underscores the need for modern Mobile Check Deposit (MCD) and Remote Deposit Capture (RDC) solutions that deliver a seamless, secure user experience. Veryfi’s Lens SDK and AI-driven extraction technology directly address this challenge by modernizing check capture and processing.
2. Technical Challenges in Bank Check Data Extraction
Processing checks involves technical hurdles that go beyond regular OCR.
MICR Line Reading & Validation:
- Requires models trained on E-13B and CMC-7 fonts, plus checksum validation and real time routing verification.
Multi-Field Coordination & Validation:
- Dates, amounts, payees, and signatures must align consistently (e.g., written vs. numeric amounts).
Image Quality:
- Mobile capture varies in lighting, angle, and clarity. Add background patterns, watermarks, and handwriting styles, and the challenge compounds.
Fraud resistance:
- Detecting altered dates, payees, or amounts is just as critical as reading the fields themselves.
3. How Veryfi Transforms Mobile Check Deposit (MCD)
Mobile Check Deposit has become the way most people interact with checks. Veryfi enhances this flow end-to-end, combining its Lens SDK for capture with multimodal AI for data extraction.
At the point of capture
- Real-time feedback guides users to align and light checks correctly.
- Built-in quality checks prevent blurry, cropped, or glare-affected images.
- Fraud detection starts before upload, flagging tampering right at the device.
During extraction
- MICR lines are read and validated against bank standards.
- Fields like date, payee, memo, and amount are captured with high accuracy.
- Duplicate detection and format checks happen instantly.
For the enterprise
- PCI DSS and SOC 2 Type II compliance ensure secure handling.
- Real-time API responses (<5 seconds) support mobile-first banking.
- Full audit logs meet regulatory and operational needs.
4. Use Cases and Applications
Banks & Credit Unions
The heaviest users of MCD rely on Veryfi to:
- Improve customer experience with accurate first-time deposits.
- Automate extraction and reduce exception handling.
- Flag suspicious items in real time.
Business Payments
Companies use Veryfi to:
- Post and reconcile incoming checks automatically.
- Validate authenticity before funds move.
- Archive paper checks as searchable digital records.
Fintech Platforms
Fintechs embed Veryfi to:
- Offer digital check deposit as part of their mobile apps.
- Support SMBs with automated bookkeeping.
- Streamline compliance reporting.
5. Developer Experience
Integration is straightforward. Veryfi’s API outputs clean, structured data, routing and account numbers, check numbers, payees, dates, amounts (written and numeric), and fraud scores, ready to feed directly into financial systems.
Developers can work with SDKs for Python, JavaScript, Swift, Java, and .NET. The Veryfi Lens SDK handles mobile capture, while webhooks support asynchronous, high-volume workflows. Documentation and code samples accelerate time to production.
Conclusion
The world may be shifting toward digital payments, but checks remain entrenched in North America. In fact, the U.S. still leads among developed nations in check usage as a share of cashless payments (Federal Reserve, 2024).
With Veryfi’s multimodal AI extraction, organizations can treat checks with the same efficiency as digital transactions. From MICR decoding and fraud detection to API integration and compliance reporting, Veryfi turns check processing into a secure, automated workflow.
For banks, businesses, and fintechs, supporting check payments isn’t just about legacy, it’s about offering complete payment solutions today while preparing for the future of financial automation.