Citibank Refuses Hand-Drawn Check

People don't pay by check nearly as much as they used to, because checks are time-consuming, inconvenient, and not in the slightest bit fun or interesting. But what if that changed? What if checks became time-consuming, inconvenient, and fun and interesting? After all, when you write a check, it doesn't need to come out of one of those official checkbooks. Holden Lewis reports:

What if you won the lottery and you got one of those giant cardboard checks -- could you deposit it at the bank?
Yes, if the proper information were written on it...
"It has to contain certain features, and it can be written on anything," says Brian Black, managing director of operations and technology for the Bank Administration Institute. "As long as it has the elements, the surface doesn't make a difference. A check is an order to pay someone, that's all it is."

Recently, my wife, who's an artist, commissioned an artwork from a fellow artist here in New York. Rather than simply pay with a boring check, we decided to pay for the work with something a bit more interesting: a hand-drawn check, in pen and ink on paper. Larger than normal, to be sure, and missing all the magnetic ink and whatnot, but a valid check all the same, with all the proper information on it.

Our friend took the check to her local Citibank to deposit it. And I'm afraid this story doesn't end well. The manager was called, no one smiled, they curtly said that the check simply wasn't acceptable, and they refused to accept it as a deposit. The manager even asked why we hadn't wired the money instead!

And so the check remains, undeposited. We'll probably just write a normal one out of a checkbook instead. But it turns out that depositing a non-standard check in practice is a lot harder than it is in theory.