Regions Financial Corp. has started offering business customers a remote check capture service.
The $86.1 billion-asset Birmingham, Ala., banking company said Tuesday that the DeskTop Deposit service is available at all its branches in 16 states. Regions plans to use the service to strengthen its relationships with businesses that have operations outside its geographic area.
Sandy Wright, Regions' director of treasury management services, said the company began a pilot test of the service last month, followed by a "soft opening" before making the announcement. The application runs on Regions' servers, and customers can access it through the Internet; they do not need to install the application on their own computers.
She said it was too early to discuss how many customers are using the service, but she said that users range from small businesses, such as doctors' offices, to large manufacturers depositing payments that should have been sent to the lockbox.
"We've picked up one of everything that everybody dreamed of," she said.
Regions is reconverting the images to image replacement documents, because not enough of its trading partners are ready to accept image files, but "the market is moving that way," Ms. Wright said. "We won't be doing IRDs for long."
Carreker Corp., a Dallas vendor of imaging software, announced in February that Regions had licensed its remote capture applications for small businesses and for companies with their own lockbox operations.
Ms. Wright said Regions has not done any lockbox installations yet. "Our emphasis is on the thin client."
