CrossCheck Blog

A recent article in Gizmodo, “I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants from My Life. It Was Hell,” provided some inspiration about the old versus the new way of doing things.

Writer Kashmir Hill details her boycott of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple, and how it turned into a five-week odyssey “to answer the question of whether it’s possible to avoid tech giants.” Her experience was challenging to say the least.

Hill not only stopped using their products, she also had a technologist design a special network tool that prevented her devices from communicating with the tech giants’ servers.

It’s not a matter of if, but a matter of when. And it’s not a matter of how to prevent it, but a matter of how to embrace it to generate more retail sales. The subject is showrooming and one that the CrossCheck Blog has covered on numerous occasions. The playing field has changed since CrossCheck first covered showrooming in 2013, and the consciousness has evolved from problem to solution (see our recent article “Showrooming Solutions for Brick & Mortar Retailers”). First, a little refresher course is in order.

U.S. consumers and merchants will not be shredding their checkbooks anytime soon. While credit, debit and online payments have increased considerably over the past decade, the paper check remains the preferred form for a variety of purchases. Many consumers are pulling out the checkbook for person-to-person payments and big-ticket items while merchants are using checks to pay for recurring business expenses.

In an increasingly paperless and digital world, check writing remains a favored form of payment. Check payments totaled $26.8 trillion in 2015, according to the 2016 Federal Reserve Payments Study. Many U.S. consumers are putting pen to paper to cover larger expenses while merchants continue to utilize the payment tool for everyday business transactions.

While check payments are scarce at establishments such as restaurants or convenience stores, they continue to be a popular form of payment at businesses including specialty retailers, auto dealerships, medical and dental offices and veterinary clinics.

At CrossCheck, we are vitally interested in payments industry security while identifying and uncovering schemes to defraud the merchant. After all, our core business is managing risk and protecting our merchants by guaranteeing a stream of payments to be deposited in the future. This is a risky business to begin with, and we always want to be aware of what is going on around us in the financial and payments ecosystem.

Today, it seems like there is a never-ending stream of ways that fraudsters and criminals can penetrate the banking system to steal credentials, identities and of course, funds in a merchant’s bank account, to say nothing of ransomware and other newly invented categories.

Like many proactive companies, CrossCheck has reached out to merchants over the years with a variety of marketing messages and channels. Some messages continue to spread the word about “check processing made profitable” while others fall out of grace, never to be heard from again.

CrossCheck creates payment solutions for American merchants across several industry verticals. Our privately held company has been doing that since 1983, so needless to say, we’ve gotten very successful at “peeling the grapes and shucking the flakes” when it comes to check guarantee and related services.

With active blog writing and a highly visible web presence, we field a huge number of questions about free check guarantee, especially at this time of year. Perhaps the timing is precipitated by the specter of making income tax payments in conjunction with filing returns, or maybe it’s an indication of the economic fallout created by holiday overspending. Whatever the reason, the phone lines in customer service, as well as the channels leading to our sales and marketing departments, are buzzing with queries about check services, including free ones.

Heavy equipment is probably not the first thing that comes to mind while considering tourism, sports or groceries, but that equipment certainly plays an active role in each of those verticals. From Snowcats and ice skating rinks to luxury liners and baseball parks, heavy equipment saves time and energy while providing an irreplaceable resource to modern business.

The use of heavy equipment is so ubiquitous in America today that it frequently blends into everyday life unless it becomes weird like dinosaur-shaped sugar cane harvesters or immeasurable like mammoth coal mining cranes. Furthermore, other industries use it in ways that surprise and delight those having a penchant for popular culture.

Sometimes the beat on the street is far more accurate and interesting than empirical research. In late 2015, the Houzz editorial staff published “25 Design Trends Coming to Homes Near You in 2016.” This fascinating look into the most popular home design trends and decorating ideas for the upcoming year was compiled by reviewing Houzz discussion forums and their “New This Week” series. Here are some of our favorites.

A January 2016 study concluded that modern payment methods are jeopardizing the security of payment data. The impact of the “Global Study on the State of Payment Data Security” was determined after researchers surveyed 3,773 IT and IT security practitioners worldwide, including the USA and Europe.

On the global scale, 72% believe “new payment methods such as mobile payments, contactless payments and e-wallets are putting payment data at risk” while an alarming 54% say their company’s payment data has been breached in the past two years.