[varunkho]

In India online banking is awesome:

1) Most (all?) banks have net banking which is a feature to pay money directly from your bank account (and not via credit card) to online merchants those who integrate it (most of them do).

2) Many banks provide utilities payment (electricity/phone/cable ETC) feature which can be set to autopay.

3) there's a three factor authentication system – username and password to login and look around, transaction password to pay to your registered billers and finally for online shopping (net banking), you are asked to input 3 random numbers from the grid printed at the back of your debit card in addition to login and transaction password.

4) For any decent amount of payment received / paid (I think Rs. 5000 or above), you get an sms briefing the transaction.

5) Auto deduct feature – there's an ECS form you can sign and give it to businesses which can then automatically deduct money monthly from your bank account. Good for auto mortgage payments et al.

Checks have almost disappeared from internet savvy people's lives – I have hardly used them in years.