I'm in the US. For context, I'm also 26 and moved in to my very first apartment in 2006.
I have to pay my rent by check. Even though I live in an apartment complex owned by a relatively large property management company, I don't have another way of paying it. I guess I could probably pay with cash, but I don't ever have that much lying around, so I've never even asked if they take it.
They do not have any way to electronically transfer money that I am aware of.
What I have noticed about renting a residence in the US is that if your residence is owned by a large enough property management company, you
might be able to pay rent with an automatic fund transfer from your bank, but it is by no means guaranteed. All other rental situations are pretty much check-only, because there's just no other feasible way to do it.
One thing I will point out is that, in the United States, most people don't really have the ability to electronically deposit money into someone else's account. I bank with a credit union, and they have a super fancy electronic funds transfer feature available to their members that is far more than I've ever been able to do elsewhere. But even with that, it only allows me to transfer money between bank accounts that I personally own. I wouldn't be able to use it to give money to someone unless they were willing to give me a level of access that would also allow me to withdraw money.
The other thing I kind of wonder -- are banks in other places typically private corporations, or are they controlled in some fashion by the government? I wonder because, when I was abroad in Ireland 6 or so years ago, there were I think 2 or 3 different banks. But they all worked in pretty much the same way, and seemed to be able to communicate with each other quite a bit. I don't know if it had anything to do with government control (either in the form of ownership or in the form of regulations), or if it was just a product of the fact that Ireland is a much less populous country than the United States.
But I will say that in the United States, there are probably half a dozen national banks and probably at least that many local banks in any given area (that only have branches in a single region or location). They're all generally privately-owned companies (which may or may not have stockholders) That's a lot of options. In addition to that, there are credit unions, which aren't really banks at all. When you join a credit union, you buy in as a shareholder, rather than being a customer. Credit unions typically limit their membership to people who have some similar condition: work for a particular company, live in a particular city/county, attend a particular school, etc. Once you become a member, you can remain one indefinitely (and your family members can often join as members even if they wouldn't otherwise qualify), but it does mean that they are much smaller than your average bank. They also have a range of services that is often rather different than the average bank, because they aren't for-profit the way privately owned banks are -- they share profits with their members by reducing fees/interest rates, or offering services that traditional banks don't offer.
At any rate, as debit, credit, and electronic bank transfers become more common, checks are becoming much less so. But because of the sheer number of people in this country (over 300 million, last I recall), not to mention the sheer number of banking options, I think it will take a lot of innovation to have checks disappear completely.
