Billions of checks are written every year, especially to businesses such as food delivery and home services like HVAC, pest control, maintenance, and many others. At-home customers often expect to write checks, but for the merchant, the number of bounced or lost checks continues to increase—a serious financial risk. In fact, in 2003 there were over 200 million returned checks totaling $151.2 billion.

If merchants won’t accept checks, they risk losing revenue. Now, with the Mobilescape 5000, paper checks are converted to electronic payments on the spot, and with appropriate subscriptions, are verified and guaranteed.

Working in partnerhip with some of the leading check payment services companies, BankServ offers a complete line of conversion, verification and guarantee services. Check guarantee and verification processing is similar to credit card processing.

Check verification. (check conversion without guarantee) Check verification is a process that screens checks and check writers against a large database of bad check writers. When the merchant swipes the check through the Mobilescape 5000, it accesses one of these large databases and compares the new transaction against the list. If the customer has a history of bad checks that have not been paid, the transaction will be declined.

Check guarantee. (check conversion with guarantee) Check guarantee is a service offering much like an insurance policy in which merchants are guaranteed to be paid on the checks they accept. A small fee based on the size of the check is charged to the merchant in exchange for the guarantee of paying the merchant on any checks that are returned. 

When a merchant uses a check guarantee service, each check that they accept is first verified. If there are no outstanding checks in the system or indications of potential fraud, the check guarantee company issues approval or an authorization number, which means that the merchant is guaranteed payment for that particular check.