Headlines:
BB&T Plans Remote Capture Service ...
BB&T Corp. of Winston-Salem, N.C., is developing a remote-capture deposit service for its corporate customers.
The service will enable them to convert paper checks into digital check images at their locations and then make deposits by transmitting the images to the banking company.
Its Creative Payment Solutions Inc. unit plans to introduce the service in April, BB&T said. The subsidiary will offer scanners and software for customers to review the check images for quality before sending them off for deposit.
The service is designed to "eliminate most geographic barriers in the traditional deposit processes for clients with multiple offices and distant locations," said Lee Leslie, BB&T's commercial deposit product manager, in a press release last week.
This type of service is becoming increasingly popular, especially with banks that want to gain market share where they have no branches. Customers like it because it frees them from delivering checks to a bank for deposit.
... And So Does Commerce of K.C.
Though Commerce Bancshares Inc. of Kansas City is offering its corporate customers a variety of ways to process paper checks, its real goal is to move more of them to electronic payment systems, an executive said.
The Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, which took effect in October, authorized the use of substitute checks and is expected to facilitate a broader shift to electronic check image exchange networks.
"All Check 21 is doing is helping us become more efficient in processing paper," said Andrew Kaplan, a senior vice president at the $13.9 billion-asset Commerce Bank. "Our customers are trying to figure out how to transition more of their transactions from paper to electronic."
RDM Corp. of Waterloo, Ontario, announced last week that Commerce would use its remote image capture technology. Mr. Kaplan, the bank's manager of product development and product management, said it plans to begin a pilot test this month with four commercial customers and will probably make the service generally available to its corporate customers a month later.
Commerce will offer RDM's Image & Transaction Management System to businesses such as landlords and utility companies that may receive a mix of business and personal checks and to those such as retailers that may have operations in communities where Commerce has no offices.
Mr. Kaplan said remote capture could enable merchants to truncate checks at a corporate office and transmit the resulting check images directly to the bank for deposit.
Checks could also be converted into automated clearing house payments. The system can scan both personal and business checks, though only personal checks are eligible to be converted into ACH payments under the rules issued by Nacha, the electronic payments association.
"The beauty of our solution is that it allows both" truncation and conversion, he said.
But for Commerce, the longer-term answer will be to help clients find ways to process payments that originate electronically, rather than as paper checks.
"Check 21 is not helping with that," Mr. Kaplan said. "It is buying us time to have those conversations with our customers."
Commerce wants to play a strategic role in helping them switch from paper-based payment processing, he said.
"That's our job with our customers over the next three years - to convert more of that invoice, that origination, to electronic, so they don't have to deal with the paper. That's our challenge."
