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In a sign of the spreading popularity of remote deposit capture among U.S. businesses, Wachovia Corp.'s treasury services division announced on Monday it had hit $1 billion in remote capture volume for a single day. The Charlotte, N.C.-based regional bank attributed the milestone to the increasing adoption of the technology by a widening array of merchants and other businesses. The roster of U.S. clients for the bank's remote-capture product has expanded by 40% since Jan. 1, the bank said in a statement. Meanwhile, its transaction volume has climbed 30%. In part because adoption of remote capture is still a fairly new trend, it's difficult to tell how high the Wachovia achievement ranks the institution among banks that offer the service, which gained popularity after the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act (Check 21) took effect in October 2004 and which allows merchants to scan checks they accept and send the electronic images to their banks for clearing. But one expert observer sees the milestone as an impressive feat. “As far as I know, $1 billion in [remote-capture] deposits per day may be industry-leading, or close to it,” says Bob Meara, a senior analyst at researcher Celent LLC, in an e-mail message to Digital Transactions News. “Wachovia is clearly top 3, but more precisely, I can't tell.” Meara says Zions Bancorporation leads all banks in client deployments, at more than 9,000 seats, but Wachovia is likely attracting larger-value deposits from its client base. Meara wrote in a recent report that banks have largely been tentative about deploying remote capture, viewing it as a defensive measure to hold on to valuable corporate business rather than a tool to gain new deposit market share (Digital Transactions News, June 7). But Wachovia clearly expects businesses of varying sizes to start using the technology, which eliminates the need to transport checks to the bank and speeds up settlement time. “[Remote deposit capture] has great momentum now for adoption by businesses of all sizes as they look to digital solutions to improve their internal efficiency and profitability,” said Lee Madden, senior vice president and team manager of image services for the bank's treasury-services division, in the statement. “After three years, we are getting beyond the 'early adopter' phenomenon and are seeing mass market for this product.” In June, however, image-exchange volume across the country fell slightly, according to the latest statistics reported by the Electronic Check Clearing House Organization (ECCHO), a Dallas-based rules-setting body for electronic check processing. Total checks converted to images and sent through image-exchange networks reached 734.3 million in June, down from 760.6 million the previous month. Still, the dollar volume processed came in just shy of $1 trillion, at $997 billion, up from $984 billion in May. The amount of image-exchange volume cleared by paying banks as images, rather than as substitute checks, was 66%, representing the third straight month this percentage has come in at that level after months of steady upward progress. More than 6,400 financial institutions, or about 39% of all financial institutions in the U.S., now process check images, says ECCHO, which gathers its statistics from the Federal Reserve, The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC's SVPCO Image Payments Network, and the National Clearing House, which provides settlement services for several image-exchange systems. Under Check 21, paying banks must accept substitute checks, which are paper printouts of check images, for clearing. Many experts have attributed the growth in volume of these documents, in part, to the growing popularity of remote deposit capture.
