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Imaging for JPM Correspondents
JPMorgan Chase & Co. has begun offering European correspondents a check-imaging service to send dollar-denominated checks drawn on U.S. banks to its domestic operations centers for clearing.
Judy N. Lee, a vice president at JPMorgan Chase and its senior product manager of global check deposit, said the service, which it started offering in September, provides a simple way for international correspondents to clear checks with images. "This is unique in the industry right now."
Correspondents "don't have to change their operations," Ms. Lee said in an interview this month. "They don't have to change their legal agreements. They don't have to learn anything new." Most of her company's correspondents are banks, but some are corporations.
JPMorgan Chase uses imaging software from Conix Systems Inc. of Manchester Center, Vt., to capture the images and then uses its internal network to send the files to the United States for domestic processing. "We clear them in the most expeditious manner that we possibly can," she said.
The New York company began an imaging operation at a site in Frankfurt in September. A site in Bournemouth, England, began offering the service this month, and the banking company's Zurich center will do so next month. Ms. Lee did not say when that site would start imaging, but her company expects to have six sites in Europe by the end of the first quarter.
JPMorgan Chase plans to begin a pilot test in China this year and to go live there in January, "if all goes well," she said. The company is looking at several additional locations in Asia.
Large U.S. banking companies are taking a variety of approaches with their international correspondents. For instance, Wachovia Corp. began receiving check images from foreign countries in September over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication's SwiftNet messaging network. Using SwiftNet requires the correspondent to perfom the imaging and to format the files for electronic transmission.
Yodlee, RSA in Software Pact
The Redwood City, Calif., aggregation software vendor Yodlee Inc. has developed a way to make its software compatible with RSA Security Inc.'s passcode-generating tokens.
RSA, of Bedford, Mass., agreed this month to give Yodlee a version of the software used in its tokens, which banks give customers to log in to Web sites.
In mid-2006, Yodlee plans to start offering a new version of its software that will verify a token's passcode with RSA when a customer enrolls for Yodlee's aggregation service. The customer will be asked to enter the token's current passcode and answer a series of security questions.
Once the customer has enrolled, RSA will provide Yodlee a virtual token that the company can use to access the customer's other accounts. The customer will not need to use the token in later sessions.
Yodlee's aggregation software lets consumers view information from several bank and biller accounts on a single Web page.
"Yodlee is still entering a one-time password on their behalf every time they log in to the bank's Web site," Schwark Satyavolu, Yodlee's chief technology officer, said in an interview last week.
In June, Yodlee struck a similar deal with another security vendor, PassMark Security Inc. of Redwood City, Calif. PassMark's software grants easy access only to people who are using a computer that PassMark's software recognizes; those using an unknown machine must answer security questions before they can log in.
Under the PassMark agreement, if a customer uses a PassMark-approved computer to sign up for Yodlee's aggregation service, Yodlee is then approved to access the customer's accounts.
