Paypal recently updated their iPhone app, which for US users added a new “remote deposit” feature for banking cheques.
And it appears to have been pretty popular, with over $100,000 being processed within 36 hours of the app going live on iTunes.
FiveCentNickel has a run through of the process, together with some screenshots – whilst the app seems to work well, users do have to wait up to 6 business days for the cheque to be processed, which is far too long for something you’d expect to be done in a few minutes. Indeed, the Paypal blog suggests that you need to hold onto the cheque for 15 days after depositing it before destroying it.
Paypal is not the first company to introduce this method of remote depositing cheques; with Chase and USAA banks two of the larger banks accepting deposits via iPhones. But when are we likely to see it in the UK?
The technology is already available, as Paypal et al have shown (and cheque recognition software is also used to speed up the paying-in of cheques in high street banks), so what is the hold up?
Will Paypal force the issue by bringing it over here first? They’ll have to speed the processing up though.