The check was supposed to be dead by now. Instead, it has become a $15 trillion reminder that moving money and settling a business obligation are not always the same thing.
According to research briefs from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland published in September, ACH accounted for 41% of business-to-business payments by number in 2024, compared with just 13% for checks. Yet businesses still made approximately $15 trillion in check payments by value, and nearly 90% continued using checks for at least some transactions in 2025.
A company can automate thousands of routine supplier payments, migrate recurring invoices to ACH and eliminate much of its manual accounts payable workload without getting meaningfully closer to eliminating checks. That’s because the payments that remain are frequently those involving disputed invoices, unusual approval requirements, incomplete supplier information or commercial relationships that don’t fit neatly into standardized workflows.
Between 2015 and 2024, annual B2B check volume fell from 4.6 billion payments to 2.7 billion, per the Fed’s research. But the nominal value of those payments barely moved, declining from $15.4 trillion to $15 trillion.
The implication is not necessarily that American businesses are resisting modernization. It is that payment modernization has been most successful where transactions were already relatively easy to standardize.
Read more: Fed Finds B2B Payments Went Digital, but the Paperwork Didn’t
The Real Corporate Finance Bottleneck Is Before the B2B Payment
The conventional narrative around B2B payments treats checks as a legacy technology awaiting replacement by a faster, cheaper alternative.
But not all transactions impose the same operational burden. A recurring $2,000 payment to an established supplier can be relatively straightforward to automate. A $200,000 payment involving multiple invoices, disputed deductions, changing beneficiary instructions and several internal approvals presents an entirely different challenge.
Both payments can be settled electronically. But only one is readily converted into a repeatable process without redesigning the surrounding workflow.
Data in “The Payment Guarantee Gap: Why Adoption Lags Despite Perceived Value,” a PYMNTS Intelligence report produced in collaboration with Plaid, revealed that more than two-thirds of surveyed firms lose or delay revenue when payments fail.
For years, payment innovation has focused on what happens after a transaction is authorized: how quickly funds move, how much settlement costs and when the recipient gains access to the money. Those improvements matter. But in complicated B2B transactions, settlement may be the shortest part of the process.
As businesses digitize their simplest transactions first, the remaining check population becomes concentrated in payments that are harder to automate. The average operational complexity of a check transaction may therefore rise even as overall check usage declines.
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“Payment execution alone is increasingly commoditized. The durable value as I see it today is in making the right payment decisions,” Tungsten Automation Head of Payments and Embedded Finance Andrew Ng told PYMNTS.
Read also: Fed Study Shows B2B Payments Are Becoming a Cost-Per-Event Problem
The $15 Trillion Problem Is Bigger Than Paper
Electronic payments are clearly absorbing enormous volumes and value. But the persistence of check dollars suggests that digitization is changing the composition of the payments market, not simply shrinking its paper-based component.
Still, the Fed’s figures do not establish that all remaining check payments are unusually complex. Some may reflect suppliers unwilling or unable to receive electronic payments. Others may involve fragmented ERP systems, missing remittance details, approval bottlenecks or legitimate contractual exceptions. Each requires a different intervention.
Supplier enrollment can address the first problem. Integrated invoice and remittance data can address the second. Workflow automation and stronger identity controls can help address the third. Taken together, they raise a question that payment providers and CFOs need to answer: What characteristics distinguish the transactions that have already moved electronically from those that have not?
The financial institutions and technology providers competing for the remaining check market face a different challenge from the one that drove the first wave of ACH adoption.
The PYMNTS Intelligence Tracker “Who Decides Now: How Developers and Tech Teams Are Reshaping the Future of AP Payments“ found in July that 58% of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rank integration as very or extremely important when evaluating technology solutions.
For CFOs, the strategic question is no longer how quickly the organization can stop writing checks. It is why those particular checks are still being written.
The answer may reveal more about the company’s operational weaknesses, supplier relationships and working capital opportunities than its payment technology.
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