With pilots nearly complete, mobile-imaging software provider Mitek Systems Inc., perhaps best known for its check capture technology, expects the launch soon of similar imaging services to help users make payments instead of just deposits.
Its newest services will focus on making balance transfers to credit card accounts and paying other billers.
"These are new things, and they're imminent," James DeBello, Mitek's president and CEO, said in an interview, declining to name the pilot participants.
For card balance transfers, capturing an image of one's card statement and sending it to the same or another issuer to receive a better or competing card offer could represent a more practical way for issuers to solicit new business, DeBello contends, citing the relatively low effectiveness of mailed solicitations.
An issuer could send the competing offer to the individual's phone, and the consumer could approve the application by clicking OK after reading the card terms, he says.
Enabling consumers to use their mobile phone's camera to scan bills to develop payees for payment would alleviate the tedium of keying in required information manually. And enabling consumers to scan their credit card statements would enable them to send the information to competing issuers for balance transfers to cards with better rates and fees, DeBello says.
With bill-imaging, which two major banks are testing, Mitek's technology uses algorithms and neural networks to detect the specific information from the documents to incorporate automatically into a customer's listed payees within a bank's online bill-payment service, DeBello says.
"It's a way to engage the customer and make [the] bill-payment application very sticky," he says. "Bill-payers tend to be among the most profitable" customers of "financial institutions."
The process is complex because no bill is alike, and there could be as many as 100,000 different formats, DeBello says, noting Mitek's system is able to identify the necessary information on any bill.
"The trick is to do if fast and accurately," he says.
In 2008, when Mitek introduced mobile remote deposit capture, camera phones were less common, and financial institutions were skeptical consumers would support it. Today, some 333 banks have signed up for mobile remote deposit capture, including 25 of the top 40 banks, DeBello says.
With the new imaging applications, DeBello says the mobile industry is venturing into what he calls Mobile 2.0, where vendors are adding pizzazz and "killer apps" that let consumers do something like pay a bill with their phone and do so on time.
"The value we add is the convenience and the application that the consumer uses and touches," he says.
