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Comment by kpw94 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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...

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