By me cheques went obsolete, and vanished, before the Pandemic, and nobody actually misses them. Seeing as the banks estimated 10% of the cheques issued were likely to be returned RD, or were forged to defraud money, them going was good riddance. Want to pay a bill, use the phone app from your bank, and all is done immediately, no need to find a stamp or an envelope (and in any case good luck sending a letter, the SAPO is in receivership, assets less than 1% of the debt) or a post box. Plus the immediate update on your bank account to show it is sent, and then a day or two later on the verification the amount has transferred, typically next working day between any 2 banks.
Want to send money there are multiple methods, use the supermarket money counter, and send a message with the transaction number, and a PIN, and recipient goes to the same supermarket chain with ID, and enters PIN, gets money, you paid the cheap fee up front. Easier now just send to the supermarket app, and recipient goes there to collect, or you use the cardless transaction feature at the ATM, which works like the supermarket, though with a slightly higher transaction fee of course (thank you Beep Bank, for making it harder), offered in some form or the other by all the banks, even those that are almost totally online and almost branchless.
As to sending a present, you send it via a cardless transaction to the recipient, even elderly people here are well capable of going to Shoprite, and showing the cashier the code off the phone, and getting the money out the till. No bank details sent at all, just a transaction code, like commonly used for prepayment phone, prepaid electricity and prepaid water.
No internet, just a dumb phone can do phone banking, all banks support it, and it uses short codes, and then sends a SMS to both parties, and is popular in rural areas, saving sending money home by risky methods, Gogo just goes to the spaza shop, and gets paid out.
Paper trail who still gets a printed statement, all banks will email them to you, you print them out if you want, or just keep the emailed version. No way to have some dumpster diver getting the old statement, taking the bank details, and then impersonating you (easy enough) and getting a new card, to replace the "lost card", changing the address and phone number, and emptying your account.
I closed my cheque account when I realised I was writing one a year, and that the monthly fees worked out to 5 times the cheque cost over the year. That was in 1994, never missed it since then, even if it meant I had to actually walk into a branch with the cash, down to the cent, to pay a bill in the late 2000's. They went online a year later, so the last time I went into a branch to handle money was then, the rest of the time was to do account stuff, collect a card, or to get lunch at my branch, as it has a pretty good staff canteen in there, open to the public. I do more banking at the supermarket over the branch, and the one low fee bank uses a chain of supermarkets, branded red and yellow, and pretty much all over the country, as their actual tellers and front end, with a call centre and online for everything else. A few branches to handle the paper and plastic cards, and send to the supermarket, is all they have.
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