Microsoft to stop accepting checks from partners Microsoft has told its north American partners they can't pay with checks starting from December 1. An advisory posted for partners last week warns that "Effective October 1, 2022, Microsoft will remove the check payment option from new commerce invoices. This change affects only the United States (including Puerto Rico) and …
ACH is a direct draw from your account for whatever they want. You wake up one morning and there is nothing in your account. This is from the same guys that last nights patch did a bsod on your server.
If you can catch it, you contest it and the bank charges it back.
So if I get this right, the latest OS wants your phone number, now they want access to your bank account?
Hilariously, nothing in the comments about the actual context of the article, it's all about cross-pond spelling differences and the editorial changes at El Reg.
As for the use of "checks" in place of "cheques", it grates on me a bit but I'd prefer that the journalists spend their time and efforts on the story rather than converting it between different flavours of English.
I notice the HTML "lang" attribute is set to "en" so content could be any English variant. Personally I can't wait for articles written in "en-jm" along with a bit of local slang.
Maybe the only thing noteworthy about the article is the odd spelling of its title?
If the article had been titled "Microsoft to stop accepting cheques", my cursor would have moved straight past, because most companies have stopped accepting cheques decades ago.
But as it was, I was curious as to what checks from partners was Microsoft no longer accepting? Checks on code security? Identity checks? Standards are slipping at Microsoft perhaps?
It is a very annoying homonym. Until quite recently, I thought that "Rain Check" meant to look outside and see if it was raining or not..
bloody merkins
(and yes, I am aware of the 'correct' use of the word merkin. They deserve it)
"This change affects only the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada."
I really do have to wonder at the ability of people to read and apply real world knowledge.
Let's see what the advisory itself says: "Summary: Starting October 1, 2022, partner invoices will no longer contain physical check remit instructions on the face of their summarized invoice."
So the 'crime' was not translating 'certain' words into your local 'lects?
You've preponed your gripes you have.
The Beeb news site held my attention for years, including the Technology and Science sections. They deteriorated. (Subcontracted out?) Paragraphs of news became sentences. Twitter screenshots were news substitutes. Technology news became reports on Facebook and iPhones.
One day hpe of improvement evaporated. I looked for alternatives and found The Register. Is it, now, on the same path? Instead of seeing a headline elsewhere and thinking, "El Reg will have reported on this in depth," I increasingly think, "I'll see whether El Reg has picked up this story".
I still like much / most of the content but news is increasingly late, or absent. 24 hour coverage seems to have diminished. Stories often don't make El Reg until certain parts of the world wake up and catch up. Reporting used to be 24 x 7, as they say.
In a way I'm disappointed. In another way, if the trend leads me to look elsewhere or even to spend more time on real life and less on the screens that have dominated my life for 50 years (*) (counting 56bps data terminals with thermal paper rolls as 'screens') who knows what I might (re)discover?
The kids of today don't know what the world was like before the ghosts in the machines stole their developing lives. As someone once wrote in the days of paper books, "Brave new world that has such people in it".
(*) The killer virus was the web-in-the-pocket. Once there was a ten minute walk to another building to log on to pre-web techie forums once a week. Then there were digital onanism, Zuckerbots and Muskbots...
Here in the UK, rather than getting rid of cheques, the banks (after an initial move to ditch cheques and being told "no" by the UK government) set up a system where you can send a photo of a cheque you've received to your bank, and effectively clear it yourself via the banking system.
This is a a good idea, because it means cheques can still exist whilst the costs of running a chequing system were reduced (which is what the banks wanted). This then doesn't discriminate against those who aren't or can't get online, i.e. those lacking the capacity, those without the funds to afford the internet connection fees, etc. Thus, such people can still transfer money in a safe and secure way, fulfilling an essential social need for those who, perhaps more than anyone else, need it, and the recipient of their cheques (generally, a business / tradesman) doesn't bear a huge cost or delay for banking them.
I don't know what the USA's new system is going to be, but I hope they've not forgotten about those people for whom e-banking really doesn't work...
This has been possible with many US banks for nearly a decade.
What's really making the US clinging to checks is the still comparatively high costs of electronic bank transfers, which often carry quite substantial fees and delays.
What's really making the US clinging to checks is the still comparatively high costs of electronic bank transfers, which often carry quite substantial fees and delays.
Well, yes, because they got away with charging customers even more for using facilities that made transactions even cheaper to process and nobody ever challenged that. Classic bank behaviour. Nobody ever got charged for the subprime mess either - they still all somehow got massive bonuses despite being bailed out by the tax payer.
Here in the Netherlands, we stopped using cheques/betaalkaarten when the euro was introduced. Most counties in the EU are phasing-out this archaic way of transferring money. In France, you might still see signs "paiement par chèque n'est pas accepté" and perhaps old people still using it. But it is definitely a thing of the past there too.
It rather surprises me, that the US is so far behind that they still use checks on apparently a regular basis.
Wait, I thought 'betaalkaarten' was Dutch for credit cards?
Anyway, cheques I don't miss. AFAIK it's now mandatory in Belgium for every trader to accept electronic payments, but given that nobody bothers to verify the "it's not working today" excuse I don't think it has been the sucess they thought it to be.
Also, given the frequent bank errors and *cough* "sophisticated" *cough* hacking that takes place I still think it's not a bad idea to have cash around, although I welcome any attempt to make car clamping companies accept a traceable form of payment.
Ah, because the Netherlands has of course used all that revenue from the wealth tax to ensure that those who, for whatever reason, are unable to afford or use Internet banking are properly catered for within the banking system... Even old people - if they can get to the shops - can use contactless payment cards. But it's not this sort of transaction for which cheques are useful.
Forcing all tradesmen / companies to accept payment cards is another way of ensuring that the banking sector is accessible to all, and now thanks to the many cheap / portable payment terminals that can be had it's not necessarily massively expensive. But that's like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut; most trademen's customers can do ebanking, so having to have a special piece of equipment to cater for those who cannot is overkill when a simple paper cheque would achieve the same end result. Paper is greener too, if it avoids manufacturing and barely using a large number of card reader machines.
In the UK, and possibly in other places, banks have a legal obligation to act on written instructions from their customers. In the past they had to deal with these scribbled on scrap paper, or perhaps on soiled napkins after a late night gambling and drinking session. Cheques were introduced as a way to make sure that written instructions were clear and legible. For as long as the legal obligation exists I'd expect some form of cheque-like documents to remain.
No, no, no, just set aside all your hatred for a second, m'kay?
Funds can be transferred on the blockchain in minutes across the globe with 100% certainty & availability. No more 'waiting for the check to clear' or 'waiting for the ACH to process'. The funds arrived, period.
Want to get really crazy? Use the Lightning Network to take the transactions down to milliseconds.
You can hate crypto currency all you want, but it does solve this problem rather well.
>You can hate crypto currency all you want, but it does solve this problem rather well.
I think it's transfer of 0s and 1s over the wires that solves(*) the problem. Cryptocurrency is merely one example of such use, and a latecomer at that.
(*) Cryptocurrency also takes fraud and loss into the 21st Century at 'light speed', as they say. You have been following the cryptocurrency news in recent years, haven't you? You know, it's a bit like banks' use of digital transfers, but unregulated and with no recourse when fraudsters do their thing...
You can hate crypto currency all you want
I don't hate crypto currencies as such, what bothers me is the exact lack of control and assurances that crypto nerds celebrate as a benefit that I see being abused to milk the dumb ones. Add to that that its main use is to pay criminals and launder money and that "mining" it as well as each actual distributed transaction cost a frankly irresponsible amount of energy and compouting resources and you can keep it.
Technically interesting (and not even that new), but it's still in search of a real problem to solve.
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