It may surprise you that there are still billions of paper checks being written in the United States every year. While it’s true that people are paying for their groceries with credit cards, mobile phones and smartwatches, and routine business payments have long been automated, 40 percent of all business-to-business payments continue to be made via paper check, according to Deluxe Corporation’s President and CEO Barry McCarthy.

“There are billions of checks that are generally non-recurring payments, or they’re payments that have to travel with information so that another business can reconcile it and ensure the cash is allocated to the correct place on the balance sheet,” McCarthy tells The CEO Magazine.

In fact, it’s thanks to Deluxe Corporation that we even have the checkbook. The Minneapolis-headquartered company’s founding story has become the stuff of legend. In 1915, WR Hotchkiss borrowed US$300 off his father-in-law to sell his invention, the checkbook.

Key to Hotchkiss’ innovation was imprinting personal details unique to every customer, or personalizing every check. He was also savvy enough to secure patents that it still holds today.

“What he didn’t know he was doing was beginning the next generation of payments,” McCarthy says. “His checks became the first ubiquitously acceptable non-cash payment mechanism.”

Fast forward 111 years and Deluxe Corporation is still printing checks – and is very proud of its check business, although McCarthy knows that eventually they will go away. Yet for the moment, the company’s check business is going backwards at two percent a year – less than half the rate of the market.

“That means we’re gaining market share in a declining business,” he says.

Transforming on trust

But the company is not staking its future on checks, even as they continue to be an important part of the broader ecosystem while the organization transitions itself into a digital-first and data-driven payments business. What’s more, the trust that the name Deluxe Corporation has built up over a century in the payments space has provided an unrivaled platform as it does so.

“We’re very fortunate that we’ve got a brand that is one of the most trusted in financial services,” McCarthy says.

“That trust has been very helpful for us as we have remodeled the company.”

As the leader in check printing, the company has more than 4,000 bank partners who share highly sensitive, personally identifiable information with them to print onto a check.

“We are a deeply trusted partner for financial institutions and for consumers and businesses of all sizes,” McCarthy adds.

Checks have also allowed Deluxe Corporation to build massive distribution, not only through bank channels, but direct to small businesses and individual consumers of all sizes.

“The company has this incredible trusted reputation, has a great distribution and it has a history and legacy of managing payment information in the most secure way possible,” he says.

“That all lays the foundation for us to do the same thing in digital payments.”

Growth businesses

McCarthy was named President and CEO of Deluxe Corporation in 2018 and, with an extensive track record in the fintech space, has been at the forefront of the company’s transformation. It now operates across four segments: Merchant Services, B2B Payments, Data Solutions and Print, with the first three segments delivering strong growth.

Today, the company processes nearly US$3 trillion in payments – or approximately 15 percent of the United States GDP. On the data side of the business, the company has been busy building one of the largest consumer and small business databases in the country, with more than a trillion individual data points. The division grew by 30 percent in the past year alone, thanks to the quality of the AI tools harnessed.

“People would not think that Deluxe, the check printer, is doing any of this,” McCarthy points out. “We’re doing it very quietly.”

According to McCarthy, a key strategic goal is for the payments and data business to become the primary source of the company’s revenue.

“At the beginning, early in 2021, the payments and data businesses were a tick below 30 percent of the company’s revenue,” he says.

“We think we’ll finish 2026 with payments and data being the majority of the company’s revenue. And that’ll be the first time in history that the majority of the company’s revenue hasn’t come from a print-related source.”

In 2025, the trio of new businesses grew on a combined basis of more than 10 percent. The significance isn’t lost on him.

“That’s an extraordinary combination,” he says. “We’ve been able to slow the decline in a legacy declining business by gaining market share, while simultaneously building three businesses new to the company so that it can collectively grow double digits. I don’t know of any peer models like that.”

Other strategic areas of focus include identifying efficiency gains that are reflected in margin expansion, something that was achieved across all four businesses in the final quarter of 2025.

“We then harnessed the success of those first two strategic goals to increase the free cash flow of the company and use that to improve our balance sheet,” McCarthy reveals.

Everything feeds in together to deliver for shareholders.

“The market is finally seeing what we are doing and rewarding us,” he says.

There’s another stakeholder at the heart of the Deluxe Corporation mission, however: the community.

“Our mission and purpose statement is very simple: We help businesses succeed so communities can thrive,” McCarthy says.

“When business succeeds, they hire people that need to get their dry cleaning done or want to go for a pizza on Friday night. That leads to more jobs. So it becomes a self-fulfilling virtuous circle.”

Over the course of its 111-year history, the company has also given millions of dollars to nonprofits in the community.

“Every one of our senior executives is expected to serve on a not-for-profit board to support what’s happening in the community. We match dollar-for-dollar employee donations through our foundation, and our employees can take up to five days of paid time off to volunteer for a not-for-profit in the community that they support,” he explains.

Deluxe Corporation is, he concludes, a company with a proud history.

“We’re using that proud history, and the trusted relationship and knowledge of paper payments, to transform the company for the next generation as a digital payments and data company,” he says. “People here are really proud of it.”