Payday. It feels great as a gainfully employed American to regularly post earnings to the personal checking account. Except when it’s a paper check. Then you encounter the inconvenience of the slow line at the drive-up ATM or the predictably stressful experience of waiting your turn in a longer line inside a bank branch. Cough, shuffle, sigh.
Until a few years ago, if you wanted to transfer your hard-earned dollars of a non-direct deposited check into your account, you dealt with the less-than-stellar branch hours, rushing over from work to arrive before 6pm on a Friday to get things done.
Now, my phone is my bank. Welcome to digitization. My financial institution offers an app with services like opening accounts, transferring money, setting up online bill payments and in a way, somewhat magically, depositing checks.
Do you remember when you had to fill out a deposit slip with your account number and give both slip and check to the no-nonsense teller? I even remember when we used to put checks in specialized envelopes to deposit them at an ATM. How far we’ve traveled in Moneyland.
Whenever I need to deal with paper checks, a few taps on my smartphone and a few photos later, my transaction ends. Easy. From the results of the poll last week, many of you must be using apps, too. Mobile banking catches on fast. It’s nice to be waiting for a margarita while watching the basketball game on a Friday in March rather than inhaling car exhaust in an ATM lane, isn’t it? Mobile banking always lets you go into overtime.
Do you use your bank’s app? Is it accessible for you? What do you think of mobile banking? Have you had an interesting experience at a bank recently? Tell me about it.
Adventures in Low Vision 
I absolutely love my banking app for depositing paper checks and getting notified on any changes to my account. Another great piece of technology are the ATMs that allow me to deposit cash and checks without a deposit slip. I can put everything in at the same time and it scans the money and checks simultaneously. It tells me the amount on the screen and allows me to make corrections as needed. I even get a receipt with a scan of the check on it. This is such a quick and secure way to do banking without standing in the teller’s line. It allows my banking to stay between just the bank and me. We live in a amazing times. Sometimes bad, but in this case wonderful. The ATM is accessible to me and it has a headphone jack. There is braille on the buttons but I don’t know if a braille user would need help. It is a major bank so I would imagine if it were not accessible the advocacy groups would be all over them.
Headphone jack–something that didn’t occur to me but it would help maintain privacy! Great features.
Between the banking app and the awesome ATM I only need to go to the teller’s window for rolls of quarters. These two items have leveled the playing field for many people when it comes to taking care of their financial business. I still appreciate that I can go to the desk and have a real person handle things if I have questions or more complicated transactions.
We’re living in the era of the Jetsons. Love mobile banking and almost can’t remember what it was like previously.
Innovation can be wonderful.