It’s July again, a month that many of us here in the United States have come to call our country’s “birthday.” Far fewer people know that July is also National Independent Retailer Month, an awareness campaign intended to promote shopping at smaller, locally-owned businesses. Fewer still – and probably none outside of Digital Check – remember that July also happens to be the birthday of our best-selling check scanner of all time, the CheXpress CX30, which made its official debut in July 2008.
What do these things have in common with each other? Well, in the case of July 4th, not much. But if we’re talking about small businesses, July 2008 was actually a pretty big deal, as it was the first time that online bank deposits really came within reach of the typical small-business owner, and eventually to anyone with a mobile phone. And on the other side of the coin, small businesses have been a really good thing for the continued existence of the check scanner, representing one of the best use cases in which paper checks still make sense over cards and online payments.
2008: A tipping point for electronic deposits
Here in 2025, any mobile banking app worth its salt will let you take a picture of a check with your smartphone and deposit it straight into your account, no trip to a branch, or even an ATM, needed. But 17 years ago, things looked a lot different. It wasn’t until 2004 that it became legal to use a scanned image in place of a paper check – before then, the person who wrote it had to hand the paper check to whomever they were paying; that person had to bring the paper check to his bank; and that bank had to physically deliver the same paper check back to the original bank.
The biggest problem for the banks was that final step; in fact, the industry spent billions of dollars annually to physically exchange paper checks (around 36 billion checks per year at the time). So, most of the technology in 2004 was focused on that issue. That meant just about everything on the market was a high-speed “production” scanner designed for heavy-duty use in a bank branch, and these were very costly, often $1,000 and up.
The result was that even though the new law also allowed people to deposit checks electronically, few businesses, and almost no small businesses, could justify spending that kind of money on it. Remote deposit was mostly limited to large corporations or certain specialized industries where check payments were common: Insurance companies, utilities, magazines and newspapers, perhaps some of the larger property management groups.
The technology was “stuck” because of high equipment prices, so banks were looking for something cheaper to bring it within reach of their smaller customers. A few early attempts were made to use simple hand-fed scanners to grab check images, but pilot programs with the banks yielded poor results. The problem was that the really inexpensive off-the-shelf scanners didn’t have a MICR head to read the magnetic printing on a check – and the optical character recognition software of 20 years ago just wasn’t up for the job. Some banks were reporting 15 to 30 percent rejection rates with checks scanned this way, which was a headache at best and a danger of misrouted funds at worst.
That brings us back to the CheXpress CX30, which (at the time) was the first sub-$300 scanner that also included a magnetic MICR head. That was a BIG DEAL, because it let the banks go out to the small business market with something they could afford. Some of them would include “renting” the scanner in the cost of their deposit services, and others even gave it away for free! Other companies came out with their own takes on this idea before long, but the important part was that it now made economic sense for a small or medium-sized business to scan their checks remotely.
Small business repays the favor by keeping checks afloat
In this day and age, it’s tempting to wonder who still uses checks at all. Surely there aren’t enough old people clinging to them out of habit to explain why we’re still using over 10 billion per year at last count. And it turns out that small businesses are one of the biggest centers of check use – not because they’re clinging to tradition, but because they don’t like to pay card interchange fees.
There’s a good reason for that: The average dollar amount of a check processed in 2025 is more than $2,800 according to the Federal Reserve. So, if you were to turn the average check into a card payment with a fee of 2.75%, that transaction would cost the merchant almost $78 – so they’ll gladly take the check instead.
What does this have to do with small businesses, then? Well, a lot of those payments in the thousand-dollar range tend to be for home services – think plumbing, painting, electrical work, landscaping and construction – and those are also often the companies that don’t have an online payments portal set up on their website. A larger company will likely have you pay online via ACH, or just build the card transaction into their prices, but on the smaller end, the card fee matters, which is why the check matters. It’s been an interesting relationship over the last 20 years, but it’s safe to say small businesses and check payments have been helping each other!
