Streamlining Branch Operations: The Power Duo of Check Scanners and Receipt Printers

People have been writing the check’s obituary for years, but they haven’t stopped writing checks. The Federal Reserve collected 701 million commercial checks in Q3 2025 alone.^[1] Volume may have dropped from 18 billion checks in 2015 to 11 billion by 2021,^[2] but that is far from a rounding error. Checks are sticking around, but the hardware handling them at the teller counter must keep pace with the risks.

Check processing is riskier than most people realize

Two-thirds of American consumers still keep a checkbook on hand, according to a 2024 Atlanta Fed survey.^[3] On the business side, the numbers are even stickier — roughly 75% of companies still cut paper checks.^[4]

Meanwhile, the fraud picture has gotten sharply worse. The longer a check sits unprocessed, the wider the window for fraudulent items to clear unchallenged. Check-related Suspicious Activity Reports filed by financial institutions nearly doubled between 2021 and 2022, climbing from about 350,000 to north of 680,000.^[5] By 2025, 60% of financial institutions were reporting year-over-year increases in fraud, with the largest enterprises absorbing the heaviest losses.^[6] The damage compounds. Once you account for investigation, recovery, and remediation, every dollar lost to financial fraud actually costs an institution more than $4.^[7]

Speed is the clearest countermeasure available at the branch level. A scanner that captures dozens of checks per minute pushes items into the verification pipeline before a bad instrument can sit overnight in a drawer, unexamined. When the teller catches a problem at the window, such as a mismatched MICR line or an altered payee, it gets resolved face-to-face rather than surfacing hours later during batch processing. Automatic franking after capture keeps the back-end moving without additional handling steps.

Receipt printers enhance the in-person experience

When someone opens a new checking account, the teller prints a welcome letter, an initial deposit slip, and an account summary. They might also produce a debit card carrier and a fee schedule. All of that output needs to happen at the counter in real time, while the customer is sitting there.

Apps haven’t replaced branch visits for these kinds of interactions. If anything, the in-person channel has gotten more important for complex, high-value services. More than half of US households still visit their local bank branch, and about 37% report speaking with a teller for routine transactions at least monthly.^[8] Even among millennials, 39% prefer face-to-face interactions with a financial advisor over digital channels.^[9]

Transactions from loan payments to cash withdrawals and cashier’s checks all end the same way, with the customer expecting a printed confirmation before leaving the building. Retail has trained people to expect near-instant output at the point of sale, and banking customers carry those expectations to the teller window.

Modern thermal printers deliver at speeds up to 500 mm/sec, and because they don’t rely on ink or toner, maintenance cycles shrink and uptime stays high. When the receipt printer is integrated directly with the core banking system, nobody is manually rekeying account numbers or dollar amounts. That cuts transcription errors and shaves seconds off every transaction, and that can add up quickly across a full day of branch traffic.

Multifunction devices solve multiple problems

Most teller counters aren’t spacious. Separate devices for check scanning, ID capture, receipt printing, and endorsement stamping eat up real estate and multiply the number of maintenance contracts IT has to track. When one device jams or goes offline, the teller has to either work around it or wait for a fix. In the meantime, the line grows. Consolidating those functions into a single multifunction teller device cleans up the workspace and can significantly reduce the support burden.

The capabilities packed into today’s multifunction units aren’t trivial, either. Scanning speeds reach up to 225 documents per minute with a USB connection, with built-in two-sided ID scanning and optional magnetic stripe readers for quick account lookup. A 100-check document feeder handles batch deposits without the teller manually feeding items one at a time. And on the output side, some of these devices now build a thermal receipt printer right into the scanner chassis. That’s one less peripheral on the counter, one less point of failure.

MICR read accuracy and image quality deserve a specific mention here, because they’re critical for compliance audits and downstream fraud detection systems. A blurry check image or a misread routing number can delay clearing, trigger exceptions, or even let a fraudulent item slip through.

Why Epson?

Epson’s multifunction TM-S9000II-NW and TM-S2000II-NW teller devices are engineered around these demands. Both deliver high-speed check capture with industry-leading MICR accuracy, embedded inkjet endorsement printing, and two-sided ID scanning in a compact footprint. The TM-S9000II-NW goes a step further by integrating a thermal receipt printer directly into the unit, so branches that need scanning and receipt output can run both from a single device.

For counters where a standalone receipt printer makes more sense, the OmniLink TM-T88VII prints at up to 500 mm/sec with serial, parallel, powered USB, and Wi-Fi connectivity options. For the personal service desk handling account openings, loan applications, and document capture, Epson’s WorkForce Pro inkjet printers and DS-790WN document scanners round out the branch hardware stack. Every product in the lineup is backed by Epson’s dedicated technical service and support team.

Checks aren’t going anywhere soon, and neither are the branches that process them. In-person channels will account for 37% of total banking interactions by 2028.^[10] That means the teller counter will continue to handle heavy transactional work for years to come. The institutions that implement fast, accurate, consolidated hardware will handle both realities with less friction and considerably less risk.

Visit Epson.com/financial to learn more about Epson solutions for financial institutions.