Union Bank of California expects to attract more small-business customers by offering to integrate its remote deposit service with their accounting software.
The $69.7 billion-asset San Francisco unit of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. started offering the integration effort last week.
"This has been a gap in the market, something businesses have been clamoring for," said Hector Sandoval, a vice president and senior product manager at Union Bank.
The imaging service has been integrated with Intuit Inc.'s QuickBooks accounting software, he said in an interview. "This is just the first of a few planned integrations with other leading business accounting packages."
Union Bank, where corporate banking is the biggest part of its business, expects the integration capability to bring in new business from small companies, Sandoval said. "We're expecting quite a significant uptick in sales."
Until now its remote deposit system has operated separately from customers' accounting software, he said. Though the imaging technology can generate files that customers can import into their accounting programs, the process can be cumbersome, and many customers simply re-enter the information manually, he said.
QuickBooks users who sign up for the imaging service can download a tool that lets them launch remote deposit from within QuickBooks, scan the checks, match the payments to outstanding invoices, and close out the receivables, Sandoval said.
Union Bank used Fiserv Inc. to develop the software that ties in with the imaging system, he said, and even though the software is available to other banks, the integration with the bank's system sets this application apart.
John Leekley, the founder and chief executive of the Atlanta consulting firm RemoteDepositCapture LLC, said he expects similar announcements this year from other banks. "It's not just about the check anymore," Leekley said. "RDC has evolved into a payments data platform."
Some scanner vendors now offer low-end models for as little as $200, making the technology available to many small companies, he said. "Within the next year you're going to see remote deposit capture become a standard feature in programs such as QuickBooks."
