KeyCorp has joined the list of cash management banks offering digital images of paper documents to corporate customers of its wholesale lockbox service.
The Cleveland-based company said last week that it is offering corporate treasurers images of their customers’ checks and related documents. The images will initially come on CD-ROM disks but will also be available over the Internet in the next nine months, Key says.
Debra McCart, the lockbox product manager at Key Global Treasury Management Services, said the company is responding to customer requests. “The demand has been out there for quite a few months. We will be very competitive, both locally and nationally.”
Users can search for images by check number, deposit date, routing and transit number, or payment amount. They can also retrieve images of the invoice and envelope, as well as that of the check.
About half the nation’s top 20 cash management banks offer imaging to their corporate clients, according to Lawrence Forman, the associate director of the national cash management practice at the accounting firm Ernst & Young in New York.
“We’re getting to a point where banks that don’t have this are going to be at a disadvantage,” he said. Adding imaging at Key “brings them to the standard of the top players.”
Though Internet delivery of images can be valuable for companies seeking the latest information — for early resolution of billing disputes, for example — the disks are better for archiving purposes, Mr. Forman said. “Instead of digging through microfilm or sorting through boxes of checks, you just search the CD. They’re both going to become mandatory for the larger players.”
The imaging service was introduced in conjunction with the completion of a multimillion-dollar lockbox platform upgrade at its four wholesale lockbox processing sites in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Albany, N.Y., and Tacoma, Wash. The company said it has converted all of its nearly 3,000 wholesale lockbox clients to the new platform, which uses RemiTrac payment-processing technology developed by ImageScan Inc. of Lanham, Md.
The new capabilities were developed as part of a larger corporate initiative to build an image archive for internal use, Ms. McCart said.
“We will be able to convert the bank over to an electronic environment,” she said. “The intent of it is an enterprise-wide archive. This is the beginning of it.”
