Check Clearing! The United States bank system consists of 12 different federal reserve banks. These banks create all the money that then gets distributed to their individual region. When you want to send money from one of the 12 regions to the next, your money (in the form of a check) needs to go through a process called check clearing. This simply means that the money from one Federal Reserve bank needs to be exchanged with the money in another Federal Reserve bank. After this is finished, the check is cleared.