The Financial Services Technology Consortium has developed a set of guidelines to evaluate the quality of check images.
The New York trade group said last week that it has submitted the usability metrics to Accredited Standards Committee X9 Inc., the group in charge of developing and maintaining imaging standards, and expects them to become widely used by banks that send and receive check images.
"The industry now has a standard method to directly communicate the usability of a field in an image," said Frank Jaffe, the president of the Falmouth, Maine, research firm MorSecure, who led the consortium's project. Mr. Jaffe has led several imaging projects for the group in recent years.
The usability metrics, developed by a group of 35 banks and technology vendors, are expected to help financial companies determine whether an image contains the data fields needed to process a payment, and whether the information in those fields is legible.
The FSTC said a standardized system for determining usability was needed because images have become a common part of the payments industry.
