I'm old enough to remember (like New Coke) ZapMail by FedEx where you would send documents by FedEx and FedEx would Fax it on their equipment to a location near the recipient for physical delivery. Obligatory Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapmail. Hey, most businesses didn't have one of those newfangled FAX machines.
I love that some of the most-sensitive information users are the ones hanging on to a completely-unsecured transmission method. Sure, tell me again about all those HIPAA and SOX requirements when we still have fax machines.
You have to keep in mind the time when these requirements to "use fax" for security came about.
There was a single telephone company (or it was shortly after there were plural "baby-bells") and the telephone network was a completely private, isolated, network that only the phone company (or baby-bells) even had access to. It was also a network that was heavily regulated such that the possibility of a random attacker from half a world away being able to tap into a phone call as it happened simply did not exist.
In that environment, placing a phone call was considered "secure" (or at least as secure as network isolation and regulation could cause it to become [I'm ignoring NSA style 'state secret' taps, those have likely always been available to NSA style agencies]). So it would have been seen, at that time, as reasonable to use fax machines for document exchange, because the "phone network" was considered to be secure against having a man-in-the-middle tapping off one's communications.
Wind the clock forward thirty years, and have the once isolated and highly regulated telephone network more or less become just another packet protocol on the general Internet, and the choice of using "fax" for secure document exchange sounds ludicrous.
The issue is that the regulations those environments operate under have not been updated in the ensuing thirty years to account for the fact that "phone network" is no longer the once isolated, mostly secure, network it once was. And if the regulations don't get updated, no lowly clerk at the front lines is going to lose their job by _not_ using the comm. system called for by the regulations.
I had to use a Fax machine in 2018. In the United States. As the only acceptable way to submit certain documents.
I should also point to non-Unitedstatians that checks (that physical paper worth as much money as you write and sign on it) are still in use in the USA.
I still use checks because in the US there are certain things you can't use a credit card for, e.g. loan payments.
I pay contractors with checks because almost none accept credit cards and cash gets cumbersome once you start getting into 4 and 5 digits.
My local utilities all charge a "convenience fee" of a few dollars when paying online or with a credit card. Sending a check in the mail costs me only $0.50. (Even though it costs them some employee's wages to handle my envelope and cash the check. Go figure.)
Checks are also convenient for transferring small amounts of money to friends and family. Yes, there is Paypal and the like and some of them don't even charge fees but I trust my bank way more than I trust a random company with direct access to my bank account. (Paypal in particular have proven over and over again to be untrustworthy in this regard, which is why not only do I have two Paypal accounts--one for buying and one for selling--but I also have a special "firewall" account between PayPal and my main checking account. This is so that the most they can grab is a couple hundred dollars on average, rather than some arbitrary fraction of my life's savings.)
Checks are sometimes the easiest (or only) way to move large amounts of money between my own accounts. There was a time where most online bank accounts would let you make ACH ("electronic checks") transfers to any other account, but they seem to be moving away from this, I presume due to its high use in fraud.
what on earth is banking doing over there in the US? I wouldn't know how to write a cheque these days if I wanted to, and the only cheque I've seen in the last 10 years or so is from my (now deceased) grandmother in-law sending birthday money to my wife.
I'm guessing this is why several US payment companys and start-ups just don't make any sense to me: "make payments easier!"
but it's hard for me to understand how to make it easier than just typing in someone's phone number or email and sending them money, or purchasing via tap and go with your card/ phone. Don't you at least have electronic transfers if not those other newfangled technologies? are you (seriously) suggesting you can't transfer money between your accounts?
Because of how and when it got computerized, it's hard to move it forward again. There's no desire for sweeping changes, everything has to move slowly now.
There are several personal transfer services (PayPal is ancient and fits the mold), but none have a lot of penetration. I think Zelle? is deployed through bank integration, and may end up with a lot of users as a result; possibly critical mass.
There was a lot of backlash on rf payments the first go round, a few issuers gave me cards with it, but then they removed it. Then they started issuing cards with chips, and now most of them are putting rf payments back in. A lot of payment terminals have the hardware for it, but a lot of them also have signs that say don't tap to pay.
I can easily do electronic (ACH) between my accounts, as long as I've gone through setup, which takes days for test deposits to show up. But to transfer to a friend or a relative is tricky.
The first digital computers were used by banks within years of each other - 1955 for BoA in the USA, 1958 for BNP in France and 1959 for Barclays in the UK. And those machines merely took over from existing calculating systems that had been in place for a good couple of decades.
US banks suck for a lot of reasons but part of it is that culturally and regulatorily the entire financial/banking/commercial environment in the US is very conservative. And there's not much in the way of pressure to make changes either - whether internally from competition and regulation or externally from the need to interact with other countries. Like broadband, consumer banking is basically an oligopoly that will quite happily plod along providing the same service as long as it can.
Can't you use a wire-transfer or an ACH transfer? All those use cases are easily solved with electronic transactions in most of Europe, Asia and even in Latin American countries like brazil. They are usually inexpensive or free and instantaneous.
ACH in the US is not simple to use. Companies that accept ACH payments are using a payment processor that comes with a fee (usually less than credit card fees); contractors aren't going to set that up. Consumer to consumer transfers built on ACH have increased in the last couple of years, but with low limits, inappropriate for contractors, and generally with terms of service prohibitting business use. It's easy to move money between my accounts with tools based on ACH, though. There's nowhere at my bank where I can say send $x to a routing number and account number, it takes a bunch of setup work.
Wire transfers are expensive here; my credit union which doesn't generally have high fees, charges $29 to send a wire (they don't charge for incomming wires, but some banks do). I've had some brokerages with free wires, but usually that's tied to a balance requirement or in connection with a company sponsored account (for stock based compensation or retirement accounts).
In the US, wire transfers can incur fees for both sender and recipient. ACH is more often used by medium to large businesses transferring money from or to consumers, but the ergonomics are pretty bad for one-off person to person transfers, to the point that if you hire a plumber who owns their own business, they'll probably accept check, and sometimes accept credit cards.
The US does have some electronic networks for instant, no-cost p2p payments. https://www.zellepay.com/ has a large number of participating major banks with some major exceptions. A lot of people use https://venmo.com/ or https://cash.app/ which are not directly integrated with banks but then offer electronic transfer of funds to bank accounts.
Australia too. Electronic transfers here are free and instant. When I used to rent I just set up a recurring payment through my bank’s website (free and easy, with any bank to any bank). Now my mortgage gets taken out each month automatically via a direct deposit authorisation. (ACH equivalent).
Checks still in use in Canada as well. I had a person today tell me they had 3 checks stolen and cashed and my response was “people still use checks?”.
The demise of checks is greatly exaggerated. I've written about 70 or so checks in the last 5 years. Mostly: Property taxes, home improvement contractors, dues for various clubs and social groups, kids activities, and some mail-in retailers who simply don't take credit card.
That's leaving out the "automatic bill pay" function of my bank's web site, which, for most payees, at the end of the day results in physical paper checks being printed and sent in envelopes.
I maintain a legacy service at work (I originally wrote it back in 2014) that is responsible for sending eFaxes from our various other services and platforms. It's one of the most internally trafficked services we have. We're in the healthcare space. Almost every document created on our different platforms results in a fax being sent.
For the SS-4 form, to get the Employer Identification Number, you have to either make a phone call (fairly long, half na hour in my case), send a fax (and get the EIN in 4 days) or apply by email and... wait 4-5 weeks! [0]
A small business owner I used to work for got sued for fax blasting people when the marketing company he hired was sending out some 2K faxes per day to unsuspecting business owners.
I still laugh about how he got several cease and desist letters and still continued sending the same businesses stuff.
Easy enough to just use "text messages" since it was not very long ago that you had to pay to receive them but had no ability to block them without disabling them entirely.
At least for those of us that were late adopters of text messages.
This also depends on where you're from - I had a cell phone for the past ~20years and only learned that you pay for receiving texts in the US when I first visited, ~9 years ago.
I did this for real ~10 years ago when a stupid company didn't accept a scanned PDF by email and required a fax of the actual document "because security". The difference is that I had a modem in an old laptop at that time, so I just send them the same scanned PDF.
Now I'm wondering if there is a provision for sending faxes somewhere in the GSM/3G/4G rabbit hole of standards.
Unsurprisingly Equifax requires you communicate with them through snail mail, fax or a telephone call.
Every other credit agency had no problem with my SSN + address then Equifax throws a flag, locks my account and says I have to validate my identity by faxing them identity documents.
Even in the 90s a lot of folks didn't send a "physical" fax, you could print it thru your modem. Or something similar, memory fuzzy, only did it once I think.
I like the analogy, but I wonder how effective it is on anyone under the age of what, 35?