(by Peter Van Bruggen)

Celent Communications has an option to process over 40 billion checks at average value of $925 per check.

Trillions of dollars in checks are processed yearly in the U.S. with checks having a 15% share of the payments total, cash a 32% share, debit cards 31%, and prepaid cards of only 25.

Under the terms of the Act, by October 28 all banks will need to accept and handle Image Replacement Documents with the chance to re-engineer back office functions.

Banks now will use images of exception items to make pay/no-pay decisions, which implies that some exceptions will be Day 1 items instead of rolling over to Day 2, and that will substitute processing exceptions manually.