Comerica Inc. has begun transmitting check images to the Federal Reserve using the SVPCO Image Payments Network.
The network’s operator, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC of New York, said Monday that Comerica is the ninth banking company to use the SVPCO network and that volume on the network has grown steadily all year.
In January, KeyCorp and JPMorgan Chase and Co. were the only companies using the SVPCO network, and they sent 18,000 items worth $8.8 million; in November, total volume from all participants was 8.8 million items worth $61.1 billion, a record.
Paul Obermeyer, a senior vice president and the director of operations services at Comerica Bank, said his company first used the network on Nov. 30, to send images to the Federal Reserve banks. “We were very excited that the execution went flawlessly,” he said.
The $54.5 billion-asset Comerica, which is headquartered in Detroit, is now sending daily transmissions to the Fed. It plans to begin receiving images early next year for checks written against its customers’ accounts.
“We have focused all our efforts around SVPCO, which we believe is the pre-eminent open exchange network in the industry,” Mr. Obermeyer said. “Right now there is plenty of opportunity within that network, and we are moving forward with it as quickly as we can.”
Susan Long, a senior vice president at The Clearing House and the head of SVPCO Electronic Clearing Services, said other banks are poised to begin using the service.
“Our volume continues to go up on a daily basis,” she said. “These are great numbers for us and a lot of momentum. We’re starting to see the realization of what we’ve been talking about.”
Banks’ habits are starting to change, Ms. Long said. Until now most of the SVPCO image volume has mirrored the traditional process of sending a single large batch at the end of the day. But with an electronic network, banks can send check images at any time, and some are doing so.
“Now we’re seeing intraday files,” Ms. Long said. “This is a whole new phase. It’s going to get them to increase their volume even more.”
Comerica was one of the first eight “vanguard banks” that pledged to participate in the SVPCO system. But it said in January that it had slowed its image efforts to ensure it could handle the complex process. In discussing the bank’s progress last week, Mr. Obermeyer emphasized that Comerica has taken a “holistic approach” to developing “an end-to-end process.”
The goal, he said, is to “transition into the production environment in a simplified manner. We’re looking forward to a very brisk ’06.”
Comerica is in discussions to begin exchanging images with a bank trading partner that is already active on the SVPCO network.
Comerica is still working on its systems for receiving and processing image files, he said, and plans to send images before it receives them from the partner. He said Comerica should be able to receive late in the first quarter or early in the second quarter of next year.
“We are gaining confidence in that program every day,” Mr. Obermeyer said. “We were very conservative on the front end in estimating benefits. We believe the benefits are even better than we estimated.”
