The Check Conversion Education Coalition, having completed a Web site to help bankers explain check conversion at the lockbox, is disbanding.
"We've really fulfilled the obligation," said co-chairman Alan Koenigsberg, a vice president at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., last week.
The Web site, www.checkconversioneducation.org, was launched Feb. 12. Responsibility for maintaining it will fall to the electronic check council of Nacha, the electronic payments association, Mr. Koenigsberg said.
The coalition, which called itself c2ec, was formed last August to help banks meet consumer education requirements for the automated clearing house code ARC. Nacha uses that code to designate the accounts receivable conversion of consumer checks to electronic payments.
Billers and their banks have an obligation to inform customers that their payments may be converted. But only 200 of the nation's 10,000 banks are active in check conversion, so many lacked the basic information to train employees to field customers' questions on the issue, Mr. Koenigsberg said.
"Consumer billers latched onto this right away," because conversion speeds settlement and cuts processing costs, he said. "But you got a lot of blowback from the consumers," partly because the transactions show up unexpectedly in the electronic payments section of monthly statements rather than the check section.
The coalition reviewed brochures, statement stuffers, and other consumer-oriented materials from its members and wrote materials for financial companies and others to use for free.
Members of the coalition included financial companies such as Bank One Corp., JPM Chase, Mellon Financial Corp., Wachovia Corp., and American Express Co.; payment processors such as CheckFree Corp. and Regulus Group LLC; and government agencies including the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department's Financial Management Service.
Nacha says 160 million transactions were processed last year using ARC, nine times the total in 2002, when the code was formally introduced. The Atlanta payments consultant Global Concepts Inc. estimates that check conversion will account for 55% of all remittance processing in the United States by 2007.
