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Comment by PeterStuer | Hacker News Reader

Just curious. Europeans under 60 most probably only know about checks from US movies, and would never have seen one irl. Are checks still used over there and if so why?

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Cheques allow you to give someone a large amount of money (that would be too unmanageable with cash) without knowing anything about them but their name. Don't need to know an account number or a phone number/email address. Pretty handy.

Also, I am 36, and I live in a country (Denmark) that has entirely abandoned cheques, but I am still familiar with Danish cheques (even if I never managed one myself). Additionally, I still see them frequently when I am in France. (Though these days, the vast majority of cheques I see are US cheques, since my wife is American.)

Care to precise which country in Europe?

Checks to pay for a kid's school trip, or a soccer club membership, etc are very much a thing in many of the EU countries with 50+ million inhabitants.

There are only 3 EU countries with 50M+ inhabitants. Germany, France and Italy. Only in France is the concept of checks still a thing, but mostly amongst the elderly in the countryside.

Your comment is technically correct, as there are only three such countries (Germany, France and Italy), and two of them (FR and IT) indeed still use checks to some amount. But the biggest county in the EU certainly doesn't use checks, nor do numbers 4-18 (Ireland is #19).

According this graph[0], there were over 1 million cheque payments in Greece, Germany, Cyprus, Malta, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and France in 2020. I recognise that the data is a bit dated, but it still seems like these countries maintain the concept of cheques.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443677/cashless-payment-...

You are right, "don't use checks" was too strongly worded. Nevertheless, your own link shows that - except for France - the check usage is on the order of at most a few checks per person per year. So not exactly a widely used payment method.

> as there are only three such countries (Germany, France and Italy)

Bedsides being wrong, as another comment points out, you’re describing the EU’s largest economies.

No, I am describing the three EU countries with 50M+ inhabits (Germany at 80M, France at 65M and Italy at 60M). Of course, the largest counties in population are also often the largest in GDP...

France is an extreme outlier in the EU when it comes to payments by checks (84.7 percent of total check payments in the EU in 2020 happened in France). But even there the method is rapidly falling out of favor [1] be it less fast then it has been in other EU countries [2].

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/443371/check-payment-in-...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1110744/share-total-eu-c...

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