Bank of America Corp. is pushing ahead with a project to add check-imaging capabilities to its automated teller machines, arguing that more efficient processing and better customer service will justify the expense.
The Charlotte company announced Monday that it now has 2,500 ATMs, or 20% of its machines that take deposits, equipped with cameras for taking digital images. (It has 17,000 ATMs overall.)
Kirk Lindsey, a senior vice president at B of A, said in an interview that the project, which will take about four years to complete, will lead to a better customer experience and will be a market differentiator.
"If one bank is doing cutoffs at 5 p.m. and another at 8 p.m., I think some customers might like that," Mr. Lindsey said. "We believe it adds convenience and lets them bank on their terms, so they're not rushing to get to the bank right away, and they still get same-day credit for their deposits after work." In the past year, B of A said, deposits at the camera-equipped ATMs have increased up to 50%.
Mr. Lindsey also said that persuading customers to deposit checks at ATMs also frees up tellers.
"We don't believe checks are going to stop tomorrow," he said. "If I could take another 15% [of checks] from the banking centers, it would still be a huge amount in our teller lines."
Wells Fargo & Co., another early adopter of check imaging at the ATM, says it has converted 940 of its 6,800 machines to "envelope-free ATMs," most of them in Northern California.
Jonathan Velline, the senior vice president for ATM banking at Wells Fargo, said in an interview Monday that the San Francisco company hopes to have about 1,200 machines, or 20% of its deposit-taking ones, converted by yearend.
Wells Fargo has been using ATMs from the German manufacturer Wincor Nixdorf Inc., largely because its technology allows customers to deposit up to 30 checks in a single transaction.
"No one wants to stand behind the guy with 10 checks if he's sticking them in one at a time," Mr. Velline said. "So there's a queuing issue that our customers were feeding back to us."
By contrast, B of A has used ATMs from Diebold Inc. of North Canton, Ohio, and NCR Corp. of Dayton, that accept only one check at a time.
"We did a lot of research on this," Mr. Lindsey said. "The majority of our transactions are one or two items, and we understand what other people have done, but the quality of the product that we have out there is exactly what we needed."
Both NCR and Diebold say they are working on bulk check acceptors.
Paul A. Tomasofsky, the president of Two Sparrows Consulting LLC of Montvale, N.J., said that imaging has finally arrived, though banks are still in process of getting their machines upgraded to convert checks to images.
"The fact of the matter is image is no longer hype," Mr. Tomasofsky said.
Despite the expense of equipping machines with digital cameras, and the need to convert back-office check processing, the industry must move in that direction, he said. "The economics of image far outweigh that of paper."
The long-term prospects of the technology remain cloudy, Mr. Tomasofsky said.
"Will image spawn a different kind of product that none of us were smart enough to think about now and that becomes the new growth business? I don't know," he said. "But I'm always surprised when it comes to innovations of products that kind of come out of things they weren't intended for."
