Financial companies are showing more interest in providing remote capture services to certain types of consumers.
Fiserv Inc.'s CheckFree Corp. is expected to introduce a remote deposit capture service today that it expects its financial clients to offer to brokerage customers.
And a report issued last week concluded that banks are likely to offer consumers the ability to deposit checks electronically from their homes eventually, but the few services available now appeal to specific market niches, such as the wealthy.
Remote capture services are very popular with business customers, but "consumer capture was one that relatively few people flirted with, because of some pretty widespread" concerns about whether there is a solid business case, Rod Springhetti, the vice president of business development for CheckFree's global payment solutions unit.
One of those concerns — the fact that people need some kind of scanner to convert a check into an electronic file — has become less of an issue in recent years as scanners have become more common and their resolution has improved. Fiserv's service lets banks accept deposits from customers' home scanners. Mr. Springhetti said his company developed the service in response to growing interest among banks and brokerages, though it is unclear whether they have had much demand from consumers.
Brokerages may be more aggressive about pushing consumer capture, he said, because of their interest in receiving large deposits quickly to fund trading activity.
Patty Hayward, a senior analyst of debit advisory services at the Waltham, Mass., research firm Mercator Advisory Group Inc., said in an interview Monday that consumer remote capture is a good fit with brokerage services.
"These customers may only have one or two check to deposit, but they are huge checks," Ms. Hayward said.
In a report released last week, she wrote that "it seems a natural evolutionary path" for remote capture to "eventually move to the consumer level." However, she found only two financial companies currently offering such services to consumers: USAA Federal Savings Bank of San Antonio, which has offered a service since last year, mainly to military customers who are stationed all over the world, and Legacy Bank, a Scottsdale, Ariz., unit of Terrapin Bancorp Inc. that targets the wealthy.
Legacy's service is meant to replace a concierge service, in which employees go to customers' homes or offices to pick up deposits, Ms. Hayward said.
Mr. Springhetti said that because USAA's service is aimed at a very specific niche — the military — some banks have said it is a poor model for general-purpose consumer services.
However, he also said that the service has made consumers aware of the technology and is driving some interest from potential users. Though bankers may have no plans to push remote capture "out to their entire audience, at least saying you have an offering has become a very critical marketing point for retail banks," Mr. Springhetti said.
(CheckFree was not involved with USAA's deployment.)
He compared consumer remote capture to online bill payment, CheckFree's flagship service. "Most banks now have online bill pay. Not everyone uses it."
As they did with online bill payment, banks are debating whether to charge consumers a fee for remote capture, but at this point there is no consensus, Mr. Springhetti said.
Some bankers have expressed concern that consumers would not realize how clearly certain portions of the check would need to be scanned for the image to be useful, he said. "A lot of consumers have not even noticed that there's black writing at the bottom of the check."
CheckFree said that to address this concern, it had to make its software as easy to use as possible.
"You've got to simplify the interface to a Ms. Pac Man level," Mr. Springhetti said.
Another bank concern was the potential of the devices to be used for fraud, he said, but CheckFree worked to address this by integrating the service with its fraud detection systems, so that banks can use the same behavioral monitoring they use for other transactions.
CheckFree has not determined which offerings it would cross-sell with the consumer capture service, though there is opportunity to sell it alongside other capture services as well as online banking, Mr. Springhetti said.
