Banks that want to reel in retail customers who have gravitated to others' credit cards and card issuers eager to steal competitors' customers have a new weapon: technology from Mitek that lets customers transfer card balances by simply taking a picture of their credit card bill with their mobile device.
Mitek has taken the same basic software it uses to facilitate mobile check deposit and mobile bill payment and applied it to the credit card world. The new software translates the image of a credit card invoice into text and automatically parses out the useful data: cardholder name, account number, outstanding balance, annual percentage rate and so forth. The bank receiving the information can match this data against its credit card programs to see if it can come up with a competitive offer.
To the consumer, this could be considered either a marketing gimmick or a convenience. For banks, it could well be marketing gold, as well as greener than mailing out credit card promotions that are immediately thrown away. "Consumers don't like to enter a lot of information into financial documentation," says Drew Hyatt, senior vice president of Mitek. "One afternoon when I was looking at the letters I had coming in from credit card companies, I thought about the fact that most consumers have credit cards from banks that compete with their primary bank. An easy solution for that bank would be to let the consumer to take picture of a competing bill to do a balance transfer."
