In a strategic shift, Brink's Co. is partnering with Metavante Corp. to offer check-image capture services to banks that want to outsource their item processing.
Brink's will purchase equipment and software from Metavante for use in its network of cash vaults and has hired Metavante to forward the image files to banks for posting and clearing. Brink's had previously used technology from NetDeposit Inc. to offer similar services on its own.
Brink's, the nation's largest operator of armored cars, announced the partnership with Metavante last week.
They said they are in production for two of the nation's top five banking companies, though executives at Brink's and Metavante would not name the customers.
Fred Purches, the senior vice president of strategic solutions and product management at Brink's U.S., said Brink's and Metavante tested the service for several months and plan to offer it more broadly to banks.
Banks "are using us before they have developed their own internal solution for doing image capture at their own cash vaults," Mr. Purches said.
Brink's, of Richmond, Va., announced plans in August 2004 to work with NetDeposit, a unit of Zions Bancorp. But at that point, two months before the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act took effect, "there was a lot of uncertainty in the market about what people wanted," Mr. Purches said. "There's still a lot of uncertainty."
"We were going to buy the software and host it ourselves," he said of the NetDeposit relationship.
But by teaming with Metavante, which is being spun off by the Milwaukee banking company Marshall & Ilsley Corp., Brink's will pass on the bundling of individual images into cash letters, a task that can be complicated because the ways in which banks want to receive this data vary. Mr. Purches emphasized that he was not criticizing NetDeposit, but he said Metavante had a wider range of products and services.
A NetDeposit spokesman would not comment.
Under the Metavante deal, Brink's is scanning checks it receives from merchants that use its armored trucks.
Paul Blachowicz, the manager of customer solutions at Brink's U.S., said Brink's could either proof and balance the customer's deposit for the bank, with the appropriate adjustment tickets and other paperwork, or transmit unbalanced deposits for the bank to process in what he called "a scan and go model."
Because of the complexities in the "modified branch capture application," Mr. Blachowicz said, "merchant capture cannot work in a cash vault environment."
Brink's hands the deposits off to Metavante, which produces an image cash letter for transmission to the bank over its Sendpoint distributed image-capture service.
Brink's is processing 200,000 items a month on behalf of the two banks and expects to exceed 1 million items a month by the fourth quarter, Mr. Blachowicz said. It will be capturing images at 40 of its 100 cash vaults, he said.
Mr. Purches said "we are in the rollout phase with both of those organizations. One is complete" and the other should be finished by the end of the third quarter.
"These are not super-high-volume locations," Mr. Purches said. Brink's typically scans checks retrieved by merchants that are outside the banks' geographic service area.
In June, Brink's plans to begin testing a higher-volume system for what Mr. Purches called "in-footprint vaults."
Brian Hurdis, the president of Metavante Image Solutions, said his company and Brink's initially are targeting banks, using Brink's cash vaults for image capture rather than installing check scanners in branches, as "an alternative for banks that don't want to put it in at the back counter."
The two companies have been working together for four to six months, doing "proof of concept work," Mr. Hurdis said, "a beta implementation working through the operational scenarios."
Check imaging at the cash vault has proven difficult.
A rival armored courier, Loomis Fargo & Co., a Houston unit of Securitas AB of Sweden, launched its image-capture service in October 2005.
But Mark Clark, a spokesman for Loomis Fargo, said it has struggled to ramp up its image-production volume.
"We've had good success in lower volume levels," Mr. Clark said in an interview Friday. But at higher production volumes, "there have been challenges," he said. Like Brink's, Loomis pitches the check-imaging service mainly to banks.
"We're getting set to roll out a higher-volume solution," Mr. Clark said. "There's a lot of potential in this market, and we're absolutely committed to it."
