Not overnight but increasingly, however, paper checks and unbanked status individuals without accounts will be attributes of a second-class citizenry. Preparations for the EFT revolution are advancing in many quarters. Transitioning Social Security, various agency benefits, payroll, vendor disbursements everything except tax returns to electronic conveyance sounds like a typical, inherently unachievable government fire drill. But unlike many other intended technological feats of the federal government, this mandate is taken seriously. That s because the savings figures alone would galvanize even the most ground-down bureaucracy.
Electronic transfers are also more secure because handling and processing are minimized.
For anyone with experience holding a bank account, EFT accounts promise to be no more complicated than the federal government s current Direct Deposit program. For the estimated 10 million people who receive federal payments of one kind or another yet maintain no bank account, EFT is perhaps a toehold on the future of mainstream financial services. Among isolated inner-city and rural populations whose banking relationships must take place outside their neighborhoods and communities, EFT can perhaps provide a key to community reinvestment. From the Needy to the Greedy Perhaps is the operative word in both of these optimistic scenarios. Although both could come to pass, EFT could preordain nothing good for disinvested communities.