Print System Helps Wachovia Speed Up Employee Checks
Wachovia Corp. is the first financial institution to use a near-instant fingerprinting technology that speeds up employee background checks with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The Charlotte banking company is using the Alpharetta, Ga., data broker ChoicePoint Inc. to capture "flats" - fingerprints obtained by pressing the finger against a scanner rather than rolling it across an ink pad and a piece of paper.
The FBI, which began accepting flats in February, says they capture 40% of a fingerprint's detail but are less prone to error and take substantially less time to capture than the traditional rolled prints.
"Once you go to capture the print, it's one-two-three - you're done in less than a minute," said Jim Kessler, the manager of Wachovia's employment eligibility team. The standard rolling method can take up to 20 minutes to capture fingerprints, he said.
Once the prints are captured, they are transmitted electronically to the FBI, he said. "We've had some back in as quick as 20 minutes."
Banks must run background checks on all employees. Most banks send a fingerprint card or an electronic image of rolled fingerprints to the FBI to conduct the checks, though they are not required to do so.
Wachovia began sending new employees in the Atlanta area late last month to ChoicePoint to capture flats and send them to the FBI, he said. As of mid-November it had used the technology on fewer than 50 people.
In other markets the company still uses rolled fingerprints. Mr. Kessler said he wants to use flats everywhere Wachovia operates, but he acknowledged that doing so would take years and that the company would have to find local partners. "Realistically, we're still searching the same fingerprint database. We've just found a method that's faster and less intrusive."
ChoicePoint says it uses its own software, along with hardware from Identix Inc., to send the flats.
Thomas E. Bush, the assistant director of the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services division, said the idea of using flats was a result of "a move to decriminalize the taking of fingerprints for people in non-criminal-justice venues."
Mr. Bush's division, which is based in Clarksburg, W.Va., processes up to 70,000 sets of fingerprints a day, half of which are submitted for non-law-enforcement purposes, such as employment checks.
The prints the FBI receives electronically are processed through the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, which has about 50 million sets of prints on file. It is designed to return results in 24 hours, though Mr. Bush said about 90% of the inquiries are completed in less than two hours.
The FBI said Wachovia is the first financial institution to submit flats for background checks.
Law enforcement agencies cannot use the technology to add new sets of fingerprints to the FBI database, Mr. Bush said.
Before 2003, Wachovia used only new employees' names to perform background checks, but Mr. Kessler said the approach was less thorough than using fingerprints. "Name checks only go back seven years, and they only check the county where you lived," he said; if a person had a criminal record even one county away, the name-based background check would fail to find it.
Fingerprint checks do not have the same geographic restrictions, and they go back to 1924, he said. "I think that covers everybody nowadays."
Mr. Bush said that that state laws restrict access to the database. ChoicePoint can connect to it, and so can the American Bankers Association and law enforcement agencies, but Wachovia and other banking companies must submit fingerprints to the FBI through a third party approved by the bureau, such as ChoicePoint.
The fact that only some of these third parties have the technology to capture flats could prove a barrier to widespread use by banks, he said.
Mr. Kessler said that the need for local partners with access to the FBI database might slow Wachovia's adoption of flats, especially in rural areas where he would likely want to use local law enforcement agencies that might not be able to afford the technology.
Pam Storm, an assistant vice president for workplace solutions at ChoicePoint, said flat prints are easier to take than rolled prints.
"In the past, fingerprint capture has been more of an art than a science," she said. "You have to have a lot of experience to do it well consistently." With flats, there is "no more difficult rolling cuticle-to-cuticle, and it takes the art out of the equation."
Mr. Kessler said the benefit is not just in speed, but in dignity; new employees, who are not suspected of any criminal activity, generally do not like having their hands pressed on paper. "You want to make sure the applicant has a good experience going through this process."
In some cases, such as people whose fingertips are either extremely rough or extremely fine, flats provide more reliable results than rolled prints do, he said.
Ariana-Michele Moore, an analyst at Celent Communications LLC in Boston, said that not all banks need faster background checks. "It depends really on the banks' needs and on their hiring needs."
The real benefit of electronic fingerprinting is in being able to run as thorough a background check as possible, Ms. Moore said.
"Sixty percent of all bank fraud originates with the employees," she said. "Criminal rings seek out financial institutions" and often either try to recruit employees or try to have a gang member hired. (
Conducting speedy and effective background checks is a good idea, but banks should not assume that someone who has no criminal record would be a good employee, she said. "There's currently a significant number of employees that were hired by the bank and then corrupted."
