Table of Contents Payment Systems .
Payment means the transfer of money.
The latter mainly involves electronic transfers of very large amounts of money between financial institutions. At the retail level, most transactions use cash, i.e. notes and coins. However in dollar volume, checks dominate because they typically involve more expensive purchases. The use of plastic cards is more common in intermediate size transactions. In dollar volume, cards have overtaken cash as the preferred payment method in the U.S., as seen in the following table. . .