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<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><a href="https://twitter.com/jayastu">Twitter/@jayastu</a><keyword id="1739516" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Jay-Bhattacharya">Jay Bhattacharya</keyword>, <keyword id="1739515" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Zipmark">Zipmark</keyword></div></div></div>After seven years helping Citigroup launch new financial ventures, Jay Bhattacharya got the itch.
A veteran of the first dotcom boom and bust, he'd found a safe perch at Citi. But he found he wanted to launch his own company again.
At Citi, he'd worked his way up to a senior vice president job, responsible for funding <keyword id="6362513" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Startups">startups</keyword>, with all the salary and perks afforded to a senior banking executive. He was a family man now, with a wife and two kids.
Then his latest venture, Mobile Money Ventures, a startup backed by Citi and SK Telecom, was acquired by Intuit in 2011 for an undisclosed sum, after a "whirlwind two years," he says.
Bhattacharya's stake wasn't enough to retire on, but it was enough to bootstrap a new company-if he could get his wife, herself a banker, on board.
He was on the first week of a monthlong vacation after the Mobile Money sale when he met Jake Howerton. Howerton wanted Bhattacharya to vet his idea for a new payments startup based in New York. Bhattacharya loved Howerton's idea for what became Zipmark-so much so that he wanted to sign up as a cofounder.
"I spent another three weeks of my month off convincing my wife that it was the right thing to do," Bhattacharya says. In the end, she agreed on the condition that Bhattacharya take on consulting work to help pay the bills while he got Zipmark off the ground.
Zipmark offers an alternative to paper checks, credit cards, and PayPal. It lets people pay for stuff from their checking accounts though mobile apps. It also lets small businesses take personal checks without assuming the risk of bounced checks.
"We act like credit cards but for paper checks, with an authorization or decline," he explained. Businesses like it because it charges It charges a 1% transaction fee. Square, for instance, charges 2.75% for credit-card swipes, while PayPal charges 2.9% plus a 30-cent transaction fee, even for low-cost payments from checking accounts.
Businesses can also use Zipmark to pay their invoices instead of writing paper checks or setting up electronic fund transfers, Bhattacharya says. 
A year ago, Zipmark raised $3 million in seed financing from a handful of New York investors and was on its way. It now has nine employees. Its beta app processes $1 million a month in payments thanks to partnerships with cloud services like Zuora and Apptivo, as well as with RentShare, an online service for accepting rent payments, and some utility companies.
The app will leave beta testing early next year, with an official version going live in January.
Bhattacharya often speaks to college students and young entrepreneurs on what it takes to found a startup. "I tell these guys, it's okay to take the risk," he says. "There are ways you can find the incremental income."
The real challenge: Figuring out how "to program your brain" to work outside the "structure" of a regular job, he says.

This Family Man Quit His Steady Job At Citigroup To Dive Into Startups

<div class="image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image"><a href="https://twitter.com/jayastu">Twitter/@jayastu</a><keyword id="1739516" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Jay-Bhattacharya">Jay Bhattacharya</keyword>, <keyword id="1739515" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="Zipmark">Zipmark</keyword></div></div></div>After seven years helping Citigroup launch new financial ventures, Jay Bhattacharya got the itch.
A veteran of the first dotcom boom and bust, he'd found a safe perch at Citi. But he found he wanted to launch his own company again.
At Citi, he'd worked his way up to a senior vice president job, responsible for funding <keyword id="6362513" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Startups">startups</keyword>, with all the salary and perks afforded to a senior banking executive. He was a family man now, with a wife and two kids.
Then his latest venture, Mobile Money Ventures, a startup backed by Citi and SK Telecom, was acquired by Intuit in 2011 for an undisclosed sum, after a "whirlwind two years," he says.
Bhattacharya's stake wasn't enough to retire on, but it was enough to bootstrap a new company—if he could get his wife, herself a banker, on board.
He was on the first week of a monthlong vacation after the Mobile Money sale when he met Jake Howerton. Howerton wanted Bhattacharya to vet his idea for a new payments startup based in New York. Bhattacharya loved Howerton's idea for what became Zipmark—so much so that he wanted to sign up as a cofounder.
"I spent another three weeks of my month off convincing my wife that it was the right thing to do," Bhattacharya says. In the end, she agreed on the condition that Bhattacharya take on consulting work to help pay the bills while he got Zipmark off the ground.
Zipmark offers an alternative to paper checks, credit cards, and PayPal. It lets people pay for stuff from their checking accounts though mobile apps. It also lets small businesses take personal checks without assuming the risk of bounced checks.
"We act like credit cards but for paper checks, with an authorization or decline," he explained. Businesses like it because it charges It charges a 1% transaction fee. Square, for instance, charges 2.75% for credit-card swipes, while PayPal charges 2.9% plus a 30-cent transaction fee, even for low-cost payments from checking accounts.
Businesses can also use Zipmark to pay their invoices instead of writing paper checks or setting up electronic fund transfers, Bhattacharya says. 
A year ago, Zipmark raised $3 million in seed financing from a handful of New York investors and was on its way. It now has nine employees. Its beta app processes $1 million a month in payments thanks to partnerships with cloud services like Zuora and Apptivo, as well as with RentShare, an online service for accepting rent payments, and some utility companies.
The app will leave beta testing early next year, with an official version going live in January.
Bhattacharya often speaks to college students and young entrepreneurs on what it takes to found a startup. "I tell these guys, it's okay to take the risk," he says. "There are ways you can find the incremental income."
The real challenge: Figuring out how "to program your brain" to work outside the "structure" of a regular job, he says.

This post is part of the "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/category/future-of-business">Future of Business</a>" series, which examines how cutting-edge technologies are rapidly reshaping our world, from how businesses run to how we live. "<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/category/future-of-business">The Future of Business</a>" is sponsored by SAP.
<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/category/future-of-business">See more Future of Business &gt;&gt;</a><div class="image-container float_right" style="width:400px"><div class="image"></div><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/helloturkeytoe/3074405219/in/photostream/">Flickr / Hello Turkey Toe </a></div>The paper check's death began on September 11, 2001.
At the time, money moved around the United States in what now seems a laughably inefficient manner: Banks trucked paper checks to central processing centers, which sorted them and then bundled them onto airplanes.
On a normal day, about $6 billion was literally up in the air as checks flew to their destination. That amount grew to $47 billion after the FAA grounded planes in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
That spurred passage of the Check 21 Act, which allowed banks to use electronic images of checks instead of paper.
It's been a runaway success: Almost no payments are settled between banks using paper checks anymore. Even substitute checks—paper checks from printed images, a workaround allowed by Check 21, were "practically zero" by 2011, according to a study published last year by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (<a href="http://www.philadelphiafed.org/research-and-data/publications/working-papers/2012/wp12-12.pdf">PDF</a>).
That study, "Getting Rid of Paper: Savings from Check 21," estimates that going electronic is saving the <keyword id="6354778" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Banking">banking</keyword> system $1.2 billion a year, with consumers and businesses getting $2 billion in benefits from faster payment processing.
Yet all this change is invisible to ordinary banking customers and small businesses, who still write and deposit checks the way they always have—unaware that the paper check has a short lifespan after it leaves their hands.
The number of checks is dropping, but slowly. U.S. consumers and businesses wrote 28 billion checks in 2009, a figure that's been dropping about 1.8 billion a year. At that pace, according to the Philadelphia Fed study, paper checks will take until 2026 to go away entirely.
One big trend that could accelerate the paper check's death throes is the continuing shift to e-commerce. 
Here's a sign of how far we come: Amazon, when it launched, let customers leery of using their credit cards pay by check. It discontinued that <a href="http://archive.slickdeals.net/f/890252-BAD-NEWS-Amazon-will-no-longer-accept-Pay-by-Check-Money-Order-as-of-September-11-2008">option in 2008</a>.
Smartphone and tablet commerce and Internet-enabled in-store payment options like <keyword id="688028" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Square">Square</keyword> and LevelUp will move even more transactions off of checks.
Braintree, a payments company based in Chicago, recently acquired Venmo, a startup that does money transfers by text message, to build a digital wallet for mobile transactions that could make more payments all-electronic.
<keyword id="294776" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Intuit">Intuit</keyword> already has 29 million customers for its various payments service and is processing $38 billion a year in payments, but it thinks it could do more—it recently told investors (<a href="http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/INTU/2338771138x0x639914/1cab6678-2d96-4901-8ce0-6ac0ffe5b32c/Intuit_Investor_Presentation_March_2013.pdf">PDF</a>) that it could increased its payments business by $4 billion by getting its QuickBooks software customers, primarily small businesses, to use its payments service. Intuit CEO Brad Smith recently highlighted the company's success at getting its customers to switch from PayPal.
eBay's PayPal, of course, is the Swiss Army knife of payments, handling online payments, in-person credit-card swipes, and person-to-person payments. Some object to its fees and its policies on holding funds; CEO David Marcus has made a public cause of improving PayPal's customer service—which is a must, if PayPal's going to compete with the familiarity and predictability of checks.
Banks are doing their part. Most offer features like mobile check deposit—which uses the provisions of Check 21 to route the image of a check capture by a smartphone right into the payments system. And Popmoney, a service offered by banking-software provider Fiserv, lets banks offer PayPal-like money-sending services for low fees.
Zipmark, a startup <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/jay-bhattacharya-zipmark-2012-12">founded by a former Citi executive</a>, likewise charges lower fees for accepting check payments. Zipmark routes payments by creating an image of a check—a purely electronic version that avoids the paper version altogether but rides on top of the existing banking system.
<keyword id="1459537" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Dwolla">Dwolla</keyword>, a payments startup, does bank-to-bank transfers for free when the amount is under $10, otherwise for a flat fee of 25 cents—less than a stamp and an envelope, a metric often used when comparing payments methods.
And Square, with its iconic credit-card swiper, is often thought of as a replacement for cash at coffee shops. But it actually serves a lot of artists, massage therapists, and other professionals who'd normally take checks.
In a fitting symbolism, Square is moving into a new San Francisco office this year that used to house a massive Bank of America facility. Across the street, the bank <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/square-new-headquarters-1455-market-2012-10">used to have row upon row of desks filled by workers sorting paper checks</a>.
Update: We've clarified a description that Intuit CEO Brad Smith made of his company's online-payments service, based on new information we received from Intuit.

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