Iowa State Bank hopes that by combining teller check deposit capture with crime prevention, it can bring efficiencies to deposit processing. The bank plans to deploy the same scanners it uses to verify user identities, such as drivers licenses, to speed up check deposit. These scanners will be located at each teller station.
“Tellers won’t have to leave their own work station to scan, they’ll all have their own machines instead of the one or two scanners that we have at branches now. They won’t have to share,” says Dena Morrissey, an assistant vice president at Iowa State Bank.
Based in Fairfield, the $81.9 million-asset Iowa State Bank is an early adopter of new teller station technology that’s resulted from a partnership between CTS North America, a provider of check capture and cash handling, and Identification Verification Systems, which sells check fraud prevention. Via the partnership, Identification Verification Systems’ SNARE users can leverage ID card-reader equipped CTS check scanners to create images of checks and government-issued identification cards for tasks such as user verification and the recording of check information. This combines deposits with authentication and teller alerts, the warnings that tellers receive when a user is potentially committing fraud. SNARE manages the red flagging of suspicious IDs and verifies whether employees are validating IDs.
The bank has used authentication readers for the past few years, swiping the magnetic stripe on identification cards such as drivers’ licenses as part of the vetting for check deposit, check cashing and account openings. The bank plans to deploy the new teller-station scanners that perform both check image capture and ID at the teller stations shortly. Morrissey says the hope is the new machines will be easier for tellers to use, which should also boost usage.
CTS and Identification Verification Systems hope their partnership will give teller capture a jolt. While
Research suggests investment in teller capture is taking a back seat to channel automation and mobility. In a July study, Celent found that transaction automation, which includes teller capture, was fifth among retail banking technologies in terms of importance, behind mobile banking channel development, multi-channel delivery, self-service technology and predictive analytics, but ahead of business process management and social media integration.
Bob Meara, a senior analyst at Celent, says that the pace of teller capture adoption among small banks is picking up but is still behind larger banks. “The largest banks have taken to this more than smaller institutions. But our estimate, maybe one in ten banks on the U.S. has teller capture rolled out or in program. It has a long ways to go,” he says.
