More than 100 billion check images are now stored in the shared repository operated by Viewpointe Archive Services LLC, the Charlotte company announced Monday.
That much data is comparable to 750 copies of all the information in the Library of Congress, it said.
Viewpointe has been storing check images on behalf of several major banking companies since 2001 and is adding about 100 million images per day. At this pace, it expects to reach 200 billion images by 2010.
Viewpointe stores checks for its five owners, Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., U.S. Bancorp, and SunTrust Banks Inc., as well as for six nonowner bank customers, BB&T Corp., First Horizon National Corp., the Harris Bank unit of Bank of Montreal, HSBC Bank USA, National City Corp., and Zions Bancorp.
The five owners said last month that they were very close to settling all of their common checks through the Viewpointe archive. Unlike image exchange networks, which send image files to paying banks for settlement, Viewpointe uses an image-share model, in which the sending bank stores the image and then tells the the paying bank where to find it within the common repository and grants it permission to view it.
In March the owners cleared 173 million items between each other, an annual run-rate of 2.1 billion images.
Lou Buglioli, Viewpointe's chief executive, said last month that he hopes that all of the nonowner customers will be sharing their common images with other Viewpointe users within the archive by yearend.
