Headlines:
Servicers Drop Suit vs. Diebold
The Financial and Security Products Association, an Albuquerque trade group for more than 300 automated teller machine servicers, has dropped its antitrust lawsuit against the North Canton, Ohio, ATM maker Diebold Inc.
The suit was dropped Wednesday, about three weeks after a federal judge denied the group's preliminary injunction to loosen its policies for providing parts and information to independent ATM servicing companies.
The lawsuit, filed in October in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accused Diebold of refusing to sell the servicers parts needed to work on its ATMs. The group also charged that Diebold refused to disclose to servicers and banks the passwords required to perform diagnostic tests on its newer line of machines, its Opteva line.
Diebold is a major servicer of its own machines. In March, it loosened its policies and signed a licensing agreement to sell the parts to the group's members and provide the passwords so the servicers could work on the machines. But the group claimed that Diebold's new policies were still onerous.
John Vrabec, the group's executive director, said in an interview Wednesday that the suit drew attention to the issue and led Diebold to define their "policies to allow independent companies to access their parts and information to service their ATMs".
Branch Imaging at CIB Marine
CIB Marine Bancshares Inc. of Pewaukee, Wis., which has branches in seven states from Nevada to Florida, came late to check imaging, but now it is moving quickly to capture images in all its branches.
It converted its first branches to imaging last month and plans to have branch-capturing equipment in place in all 41 branches by early September. Tellers use scanners on the back counter to capture check images in batches throughout the workday.
The $1.2 billion-asset CIB Marine has five different bank charters. Mike Rechkemmer, an executive vice president and the chief operations officer, said Monday that before it launched its branch capture project, the only check images it captured were exception items, which it sent by courier to an operations center in downstate Illinois.
Until Congress passed the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act in late 2003, "management felt it was too expensive" to capture and store images, Mr. Rechkemmer said. "With Check 21, it turned out to be a blessing. We have no big iron, cameras, or equipment on the books."
A team began studying the imaging issue about the time Congress passed the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, he said, and CIB Marine selected a suite of software products from Fidelity Information Services Inc., which is majority owned by Fidelity National Financial Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla., for branch capture and centralized image processing.
In conjunction with the branch capture project, CIB Marine is consolidating three check processing operations into a single center in the Chicago area.
The decision to use the Mount Prospect, Ill., center "was based on the staff I had in place," Mr. Rechkemmer said. "With imaging, you can be anywhere."
CIB Marine can post "on-us" checks to customer accounts directly from the image files, and it is sending checks to other banks though the Federal Reserve System for clearing, he said.
Though CIB Marine must bear the cost of printing image replacement documents for presentment to other banks, it expects to break even on the image investment within 15 months.
