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NCR Corp.'s agreement with Document Capture Technologies Inc. opens the door for NCR to participate in the fast-growing market of remote deposit capture for small businesses with what both companies view as an affordable check scanner.
The deal calls for NCR to resell Document Capture's DocketPort scanner with NCR's Aptra Passport software to NCR's bank customers. The banks in turn would sell the bundled offering to their small-business clients, NCR says.
The Duluth, Ga.-based ATM manufacturer has rebranded DocketPort under the NCR Personal Scanner name, Denis Bergeron, NCR director of product management for payment solutions, tells ATM&Debit News.
With the NCR Personal Scanner, a small-business owner or employee feeds one check at a time into the machine, which captures images of the front and back of the draft. The Aptra software sends the image to the company's bank, which deposits the funds.
The electronic transfer of documents is a customer convenience, NCR says.
Bob Meara, senior analyst for Celent LLC, a Boston-based consulting firm, agrees. "With the scanner, a small-business owner does not have to troop to the bank to make a deposit," which improves the timing of bank deposits and the availability of funds, he says.
The service also is in keeping with NCR's strategy of promoting self-service. "We selected the DocketPort terminal to expand our self-service suite," Bill Nuti, the ATM maker's chairman and CEO, said in a statement.
Document Capture designed the scanner to make it easy for small-business owners and employees to use because the machine has few moving parts, Bergeron says.
"The scanner reorganizes the check. There is no such thing as putting the check in upside down or the wrong way. The scanner corrects it," Bergeron says.
NCR and Document Capture, which is based in San Jose, Calif., also have tried to keep the scanner's price low to persuade small-business owners to buy it, he says. Both companies agreed on a price point after interviewing small-business customers to determine what they were willing to pay.
NCR is selling the scanner to banks for less than $230. Small businesses, however, will be required to pay an additional undisclosed price for the Aptra software, an NCR spokesperson says. Banks will negotiate that price with small-business customers, the spokesperson adds.
This week's announcement means NCR is targeting a new market for the service. The industry introduced remote deposit capture several years ago, but it marketed it to large banks and companies that paid a $1,000 for a scanner, Meara says.
Large banks and businesses quickly adopted the service, which resulted from federal legislation that took effect Oct. 28, 2004, says John Leekley, founder and CEO of RemoteDepositCapture.com, an independent Web portal based in Alpharetta, Ga. The legislation created the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, allowing banks and businesses to electronically transfer digital image of checks instead of the actual paper, Leekley says.
Remote deposit capture has proven to be much more popular than competing emerging technologies, such as mobile banking, Leekley says.
"It took four years for 50% of the nation's banks to adopt remote deposit capture compared with eight years for 50% of banks to adopt mobile banking," he says.
Although small businesses are not huge individually, combined they create a big market. Some 27 million small businesses with checking accounts exist in the U.S., NCR says. |
Celent expects small business' use of remote deposit capture to increase by more than 400% during the next three years. Celent predicts the number of scanners to increase to 600,000 by the end of this year to 3.5 million by 2012. ATM
