Advantages of Direct Deposit/Payment

In times of disaster, the significance of Direct Deposit and Direct Payment looms large.

A reliable source reports that a national retailer with thousands of employees displaced by store closures after 2005's Hurricane Katrina directed that any of those employees could ask for a transfer to one of the retailer's open outlets, and be immediately placed on that store's payroll, without regard to store hiring caps or other normal restrictions.

Large numbers of "refugees" from the Gulf Coast relocated -- some temporarily, some permanently. In many cases, they moved far from the financial institutions they dealt with for years.

Each of these scenarios illustrates a reason that Direct Deposit and Direct Debit can be such powerful tools in the hands of financial institution customers. Whether an individual relocates to another job location with the same employer, or families relocate their entire lives, their financial stability can be maintained when their paychecks or government or retirement benefit payments are directly deposited.

Find out more about Direct Deposit and how it can benefit depositors, at:

Direct Deposit Resources

ID Theft and Direct Payment
The combination of Direct Payment (sometimes called Direct Debit) and electronic bill payment programs can help eliminate a principal source of information for ID thieves: the rural delivery mailbox.

Outgoing mail containing checks for bill payments is a "sitting duck" for thieves with designs on the remitters' identities. Not only is there bank account information ripe for the picking in the outbound checks, but there is also account information for the retailer, the credit card issuer, the utility, or other entity holding an account for their customers. The combination of bank and vendor information can create fertile ground for the ID thief.

Direct debit or electronic bill payment programs eliminate those tempting bits of information from outgoing mail.

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