UMB Financial Corp. of Kansas City, Mo., is rolling out a remote-capture service that combines check imaging with automated clearing house conversion.
Banks and vendors are increasingly trying to merge once-separate applications to offer new services.
The $8.9 billion-asset UMB said Wednesday that the service can evaluate incoming check images and decide whether they can be converted into ACH payments. It uses software from the Omaha vendor RemitPro Inc. that also can be linked to corporate clients' accounting systems.
Uma Wilson, an assistant vice president in UMB's payment and technology solutions unit, who oversees the new service, said it will go live today.
Ms. Wilson said the service will let UMB convert eligible checks to ACH transactions using either of the standard entry class codes: BOC (for back-office conversion), which has been available since March, and ARC (for accounts receivable conversion at the retail lockbox), which has been available since 2002.
"We wanted to have both BOC and ARC, as well as the real-time interface," she said, and the BOC capability will let UMB to sell check conversion to small customers that typically would not be able to use ARC.
"This aligns us not only to our commercial customers, but also to our small-business customers," Ms. Wilson said. "In less than two months" since the rules establishing the BOC code took effect, "we have this product."
UMB has offered a remote-capture service for nearly 18 months and has clients ranging from small businesses that image as few as 30 checks a month to local utilities that image as many as 20,000, sometimes from as many as 30 or 40 locations, she said. That service will be phased out.
Potentially more important is UMB's ability to tie its corporate customers' imaging systems in with their general ledger or accounts receivable for automated processing, she said. "Remote deposit is great, but it's not just about scanning checks."
Jana Waughn, the president and chief executive of RemitPro, said her company usually sells its software directly to corporations or works with partners such as the developers of general ledger software.
In its direct sales efforts, it offers financial companies such as mutual fund operators, broker-dealers, and insurance companies the ability to draw data from check images to make sure that payments post properly to client accounts.
Its software also lets companies produce an end-of-day spreadsheet that can be posted directly into QuickBooks software, she said.
UMB is the largest banking company that works with RemitPro, Ms. Waughn said.
"We're in the process of on-boarding all of their customers to our platform," she said. "UMB has a good bit of pent-up demand" for remote image capture. "We think it's going to be a great relationship for us."
John Leekley, the founder and CEO of RemoteDepositCapture LLC, an independent market watcher, said tighter integration into corporate financial systems is a natural evolution for imaging.
"It all points to payments convergence and process convergence, leveraging a single platform to process payment transactions and to capture and utilize the data associated with those transactions," Mr. Leekley said.
He predicted that financial companies soon would develop the capability to conduct fraud checks and risk analysis at the point when a check is imaged at the point of presentment.
Bob Meara, a senior analyst at the Boston research and consulting firm Celent LLC, said that linking remote capture with accounting systems would mean more work for banks and vendors.
"Although the opportunity is significant for the banking industry, these solutions are not going to eclipse other remote capture solutions," Mr. Meara said. "It will be a minority of clients, but they will be important clients."
He also said automated ACH decisioning would be more useful to large clients.
"If you're depositing a handful of checks a day, it doesn't make a lot of difference if it's 8 cents an item or 2 cents an item, but if you're a 10,000 item-a-day local electrical cooperative, it could make a difference," Mr. Meara said.
