Check Cards Catching On With Buyers

For business travelers wary about hitting the road with a stash of cash, there’s an increasingly popular alternative.

It’s the individual checking account, made portable by so-called “check cards” that allow users to buy electronically, anywhere, anytime, with their own funds but without having to write an actual check.

Debit cards have been around for some time, primarily used for getting cash from automated teller machines. But, according to Linda Baker, a senior vice president at Visa International, using them to pay for purchases directly from checking accounts is becoming more widespread.

Last year there were 15.1 million cards usable on the Visa system for checking account withdrawals. They look like any other bank credit card, and the merchant handling the transaction doesn’t know the payment is coming from a checking account instead of being charged to a credit card.

All it takes is a swipe of the card for the merchant to get approval for the purchase. In Visa’s case, that’s at 12 million locations in more than 200 countries, the same locations where the Visa charge card is accepted.

Visa, which is an association of about 19,000 banks around the world, is the predominant player in the check card field. Its major competitor is MasterCard with about 5 million check cards in use.

“Merchants see this as a real advantage,” Baker said. “If they take a check card, it brings in more customers. People don’t want to carry a lot of cash. And it brings the vendor the safety of not having to take bank checks, since every transaction is authorized.

Business travelers may find check cards a convenient way to separate business from personal purchases--using a check card, for example, for personal items while charging corporate expenses on a standard credit card.

When traveling overseas, she said, a check card “gets you the . . . benefit of a wholesale exchange rate.”

But statistics show that Americans overwhelmingly prefer to pay in cash. Of the approximately 103 billion consumer purchases done at the point of sale in the United States last year, 70% were in cash.