Will the Banque de France ban the sending of checkbooks to homes?

Will you soon have to go to a bank branch to get your checkbook? In any case, this is what our colleagues from Les Échos are saying this Thursday, affirming in an article that “the Bank of France wants to stop the sending of checkbooks by mail”, so as to limit fraud. “The interpretation is a little excessive,” said the governor of the French central bank, François Villeroy de Galhau, questioned on this subject on the set of France 2 this Thursday morning.

“What is true is that we are working with banks to reduce the risk of check fraud, because it is the most defrauded payment instrument,” he added. What we want is an alternative, not a ban. That customers can collect their checkbook free of charge from the branch and not simply have to send it by mail, which presents more risks.” According to the latest annual report from the Observatory for the Security of Means of Payment (OSMP) of the Banque de France, although the check fraud rate fell in 2022 (to 0.073% compared to 0.079% in 2021), it “ still remains the highest among the different payment methods.

If the Banque de France is taking up the subject, it is because it is observing that banks are increasingly sending checkbooks by post. “After the crisis linked to Covid-19 and the related periods of confinement, it appeared that users increasingly favored receiving the checkbook at home,” noted the latest OSMP report, estimating “that approximately two thirds of checkbooks are sent by post in different forms (single letter, followed letter, registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt).”

In this report, published in July 2023, the Banque de France already asked banks to give their customers the choice. “Customers must retain the possibility of withdrawing their checkbook from an agency at any time, at least for customers of a banking establishment with a network of agencies,” she called, adding that “this possibility must be explicitly offered to customers, and this free of charge. This free service is far from always being guaranteed, if we are to believe the MoneyVox comparison carried out in December 2022, which shows in particular that a third of the banks listed charge for sending a checkbook to your home in a single envelope, average price of 2.01 euros. Free shipping is even rarer for registered mail.