News

Check-imaging: Endless opportunities

April 5, 2006

This article appeared in the ATM & Financial Self-Service Executive Summary, Spring 2006.

Check 21 opened the door for more back-end ATM efficiency, and now innovative software is opening possibilities for better, marketable front-end service that can keep customers coming back to the ATM.

This story and all the great free content on ATMmarketplace is supported by: Wausau Financial Systems Request free info from this company!

Doug Turner, product line manager for Wausau Financial Systems, explained an image-based ATM's inner workings.

"If you go to an ATM today and you want to deposit money, you have to get an envelope and deposit it in that envelope," Turner said. "On the back side, the bank has to take that envelope, strip it, review the check to make sure it's signed and the date is correct, and then they have to go through the processing of that transaction. It's a time-consuming process. We have a system that will put the envelope through a scanner and do an OCR (optical character reader) read on the envelope."

Turner said the advent of the image-based ATM, which doesn't use envelopes, revolutionizes bank deposit systems. Transactions that used to take two to three minutes of an employee's time now take 30 seconds.

And since the images are now legal documents, the paper documents don't need to be emptied from an ATM as often - saving service visits that can be especially expensive for off-site machines.

While the back-end has obvious efficiencies, the machines also have marketable features on the front-end.

WoodTrust Bank of Wisconsin Rapids, Wis., installed one image-based ATM in 2005. Vice president of retail banking Larrie Hayes said the bank, faced with replacing its old ATM for Triple DES compliance, chose to install the most attention-grabbing machine it could find. An image-based ATM, with its flashy monitor, fit the bill.

"We were remodeling the branch and wanted something to talk about with the latest, greatest ATM technology," Hayes said.

As it turns out, the buzz the state-of-the-art ATM brought with it now helps business at a local convenience store and competing ATM owner, Kwik Trip. Kwik Trip embraced another growing trend in the ATM industry: not charging foreign ATM fees.

"(The image-based ATM) does provide some great convenience to the customer by allowing him to process both cash and checks in an envelope-less environment," Hayes said. "It's got some fraud protection in it. We also have a stamp dispenser so a customer can purchase a book of stamps at the ATM."

John Orth, imaging systems manager at Data Financial, which owns Check21solutions.com, said image-enabled ATMs deposit money much faster and can instantly tell a customer if a check is written on a closed account.

"Up until now, if you deposited money into an ATM with an envelope, the bank wouldn't process that deposit until the next day, so the availability of the funds in those items took longer," Orth said. "(Image-based ATMs allow) earlier availability of funds and more validity of funds by identifying fraudulent checks."