Suncoast Schools Federal Credit Union has been able to cut transportation costs and reduce staffing by imaging checks at the automated teller machine but has found that customers need help to use the machines.
The $5.3 billion-asset Tampa credit union, the nation's seventh-largest, replaced 100 deposit-taking ATMs last year to comply with the triple data encryption standard, said Wanda Chambers, Suncoast's vice president of document services, and it activated the check-imaging feature on the last group of machines this week.
The credit union was able to eliminate "empty-envelope" fraud, closed two cash rooms where the envelopes were processed, moved nine workers to other jobs, and cut courier and processing costs, Ms. Chambers said at a presentation during the Bank Administration Institute's TransPay conference this week in Orlando.
She said the credit union also found that customers increased their cash deposits at ATMs by 15%, which she attributed to their increased confidence because they could see images of the individual bank notes and checks on the ATM's printout.
But the credit union found that it had to supply instructional videos on the machines to show customers how to make a deposit, Ms. Chambers said. "You would think, in today's vending machine society, people would know not to fold the bills," she commented.
Executives are also working with the machines' vendor, Diebold Inc. in North Canton, Ohio, to develop a system to let the machines continue accepting check deposits when the cash storage unit malfunctions, Ms. Chambers said. Today, a failure in either the scanner or the storage unit can disable the entire deposit function.
