Decypher

Marseille, janvier 2020

The cheque, so useful to bring the bank account into the heart of the French population, is now abhorred by banks. Too much complex materiality, manual operations and processing for this medium compared to the seemingly immediate electronic flows of transfers and other connected operations with bank cards.
Obliged by the State to preserve this means of payment, they welcomed with relief the automated teller machine for cheques, which is intended to replace this costly work. Indeed, replace… the work of employees with that of the customer, who must enter all of his or her banking details, insert the cheques in the right place so that their identification strip can be located and transformed into a unique client account identifier.
The automaton overlooks what was at the heart of the cheque: the handwritten amount, the date and, even more importantly, the signature, which guarantees its authenticity. All this is now superfluous, because it is too complicated to process. It focuses only on these fragments of inscriptions in the dedicated box and applies its character recognition only there. It deciphers and thus transforms the signs into a real number, the one that will lead to an irreversible monetary transfer.
But the human hand traces such variable features that, one last time, it is necessary to call upon a biological reader: do you agree with the sum? So your fingers are once again solicited, attracted by the coloured buttons on the screen. Don’t think too much, in a few seconds, for lack of your disapproval, he will complete this operation, satisfied by its work.