Having had the chance to spend some time reviewing the 2013 Federal Reserve Payments Study, I was struck by the lasting power of the check in the consumer-to-consumer (or P2P) space. Although overall check usage has declined (checks written by businesses and by consumers to businesses have all declined significantly), check usage in the P2P space increased between 2006 and 2009 and was stable from 2009 to 2012. And this has occurred when the number of bank and nonbank mobile P2P payment solutions that have entered the marketplace or matured during the past few years.

As a parent of two young children, I have acquired ample experience in the P2P payments space—that is, in paying babysitters. As a self-proclaimed payments geek, I am always interested in learning how the babysitter prefers to be paid. Cash remains king with most, at least the high school-aged ones. We have one college-aged sitter who likes being paid through a nonbank P2P payment provider. And most recently, another college-aged sitter wanted to be paid by check, which really caught me off guard. She informed me that she uses her mobile banking app to process her checks through mobile remote deposit capture (RDC) and that she prefers having access to the funds through her debit card over cash. The amazing thing that has struck me from these weekly transactions is the efficiency of this P2P payment transaction.

If the babysitter makes the mobile deposit before 9 p.m. (ET), she has access to the funds the following day. If after 9 p.m. , the funds are available to her in two days. On my end, the transaction appears in my banking activity the morning following the deposit. Talk about efficient—fast and inexpensive (no fees paid by either of us)!

Obviously, the efficiency of this transaction would have been diminished were this not a face-to-face transaction. And maybe that is where the true value of online or mobile P2P payments comes into play. However, the resilient check and mobile RDC banking application worked really well in this face-to-face setting. According to a recent report, mobile RDC was offered by approximately 20 percent of U.S. banks in 2013, up from 7 percent at the end of 2012. As more financial institutions roll out the offering in the upcoming year, maybe it will be the case that the old paper check is here to stay and will flourish in the P2P payments space. And based on my experience, that might not be a bad thing!

Douglas A. KingBy Douglas A. King, payments risk expert in the Retail Payments Risk Forum at the Atlanta Fed