Georgia is a digital payments hub. Is anyone still using checks?

Over the decades, as he grew his company from a one-man band to now having more than 500 employees, that share has shifted dramatically. About 50% of his transactions now are from cards, while about 20% come from checks and he doesn’t accept cash anymore.

Brooker said it’s mainly older customers who use checks now.

“My kids are never gonna have a checkbook,” he said.

Metro Atlanta is a global hub for electronic payments, with estimates of 70% of all U.S. debit, credit and other digital payments being processed in Georgia. That dominance in digital payments spun out of the region’s decades-old role in clearing checks via the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the city’s status as a banking center.

Age is “basically the number one indicator” of who is writing checks anymore, said Kevin Foster, a survey director at the Atlanta Fed.

Paper checks are still a common payment method for consumers age 65 or older, Foster said, but not for younger consumers.

Even for Deluxe Corp., the company credited with inventing the modern check, checks are a decreasing portion of its revenue. Checks are still big business, but earlier this year, revenue from the digital side surpassed that of the check and printing sides for the first time in its more than 100 years in business.

Deluxe was founded in Minnesota in 1915, but since 2021 has based the majority of its digital operations in metro Atlanta. It has grown over the past century from being a check printer to now processing more than $2 trillion a year in payments.

The company counts most of the major banks and millions of small businesses as its customers and is “a very large scale business that operates behind the scenes that most people don’t know about, and wouldn’t necessarily know about, but they probably use every day,” said Barry McCarthy, CEO of Deluxe.

Credit: Handout

Credit: Handout

Deluxe is one of many payment processing companies that have a home in Atlanta.

The region is known as “Transaction Alley.”

Six of the 10 largest U.S. payment processing firms have major operations in Georgia, according to the Electronic Transaction Association, an industry trade group. A recent study by accounting firm PwC said payments companies directly employ 19,000 people in Georgia, with some 71,000 jobs overall tied to the sector.

But even though paper checks are declining, that rate has slowed in recent years. A 2012 study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia predicted that if the decline in the number of checks written it was seeing at the time was extrapolated forward, checks could disappear by 2026.

But checks are still here.

In October 2025, a third of all consumers said they used a check to make a payment in the past 12 months, according to a study published in June by the Atlanta Fed. That is not much different from the year before, said Foster, one of the study’s authors.

For Deluxe, as recently as 2020, the combination of checks and other printed material was about 70% of the company’s business, McCarthy said.

That has rapidly changed over the past six years not because checks have slowed down dramatically, but because the data and digital payments sides of Deluxe have grown.

So who is still using checks? Older Americans and businesses.

Among companies, about 40% of business-to-business payments in the U.S. are still being handled by paper check, according to McCarthy.

“Our print facilities are producing around 100,000 packages of checks getting mailed to consumers and small businesses every day,” he said.

“So checks are certainly, from a consumer’s perspective, not a big part of their existence, but for businesses, very significant portion of the economy still transacts via check,” he said.

Atlanta also plays an important role in processing checks, alongside its status in the digital payments world. Around one-third of the total U.S. check volume is processed by the Federal Reserve Financial Services, which is anchored at the Atlanta Fed, according to the institution.

Some fear that checks are a less safe payment method as reports of check theft and washing have increased, but less than 1% of consumers reported check fraud, according to the Atlanta Fed.

Ultimately, just as paper is ephemeral, McCarthy said checks are not the future of payments.

The digital payments and data businesses are where Deluxe is growing, he said. The company recently acquired a Nashville-based financial technology company for $625 million. Deluxe has also built a massive data set of trillions of unique data points on every marketable consumer and small business in the U.S.

Recently, Brooker, the TE Certified owner, said his 13-year-old son tagged along with him to a bank and while there, Brooker wrote out a check.

“He was, like, watching very intently,” Brooker recalled, “because that was like something he’s never experienced his entire life, being inside an actual bank branch and writing out a check.”

For Brooker, while some of his vendors still ask for payments by check and his company accepts them, he thinks they will eventually go away.

“I think checks are hanging out, but I don’t know how long they will,” he said.