Most people blindly trust the bill-pay service of their CU/bank, which is not really a service of the bank but rather outsourced to some centralized service.

The centralized services are GRATIS. So, yikes, what are they doing with the data to support their business? I don’t really need an answer.. not gonna trust it.

I want another option. The normal alternative is make out a check by hand and mail it. That’s decent. I don’t mind paying for a stamp. But it’s not a maintainable option for someone who travels and needs to work remotely.

In principle, a service that prints what I need an mails it for me /for a fee/ seems ideal. That is, they need not exploit data for profit. There already exists services that will print and mail any PDF you send. But if you need a check printed, that’s a problem because checks require a special magnetic MICR ink or toner.

Or am I wrong about the need for magnetic ink? This service and this service seem to imply anyone can print a check with no mention of special ink or toner. It makes me wonder if it would be possible to simply use a service that prints PDFs and mails them.

(update) The checkeeper service uses Cloudflare. Yikes. And yet they can still claim to be HIPAA compliant. That’s sad. Otherwise it actually looks like what I am after. At first I thought it was just an check design app but in fact they will also print and mail checks for people. However, $15/month is a show-stopper.. only makes sense for high-volume use.

No.

Most people blindly trust the bill-pay service of their CU/bank, which is not really a service of the bank but rather outsourced to some centralized service.

Never heard of this before, and it would have to be disclosed somewhere in documentation/disclosures. Are you certain of the existence of a sub processor?

There is (or was) a duopoly for the most part. Yodlee and something else, forgot what they were called. And I think Yodlee restructured or something. Yodlee is the Google of finance data. And the data is abused.

CUs outsource practically everything. They don’t even have the competency to print the account statements themselves. They outsource billpay, statement printing, their smartphone app, and even the distribution of the app. Their website¹ is outsourced, the host it runs on, and most CUs are also outsourcing to Cloudflare on top of that who then has a detailed view of all the traffic.

None of this is disclosed, generally (as no law requires disclosure - so why would they?). No transparency. No privacy safeguards; no GDPR (except California has their own watered down version of it). It’s a nationwide shit show. CUs lead customers to believe they are some small in-house yet complete operation but when they outsource practically everything except the clerk who does over-the-counter transactions, it’s just an ocean of syndicates creating the illusion of decentralization.

(edit) footnote 1: I should elaborate. If you inspect the HTML of many banking website portals, a few patterns will be obvious. It seems there are 3 or 4 banking server software packages that are used nationwide. That is, your bank most likely uses 1 of those 3 or 4 packages. Nothing is home-grown.