Jacob Sartwell printed image replacement documents recently at the Minneapolis Fed. These are printed copies of electronic checks that were scanned at other locations.
With demand for checks falling, changes are ahead for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis' 67-year-old check-clearing operations.
For 67 years, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has opened its doors, around-the-clock, to legions of delivery trucks brimming with checks.
About 800 million of the pieces of paper go through the system each year, so many that, stacked one on top of the other, they'd stretch 125 miles high. Within the space of a year, that all will change.
Waves of electrons have been eroding the mountain of paper at the Minneapolis Fed. Electronic banking is so rapidly becoming the norm that only one in three non-cash transactions are now made with paper checks, according to a Fed survey.
The change is taking place at a geometric pace -- last year, 7 percent of the checks going through the Minneapolis Fed were electronic, this year the share rose to 35 percent, and next year, two-thirds of the transactions are expected to be composed of bits and bytes, not paper.
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