By John Adams

Originally appeared in Bank Technology News, April 2011

Like a summer basketball game at the playground, mobile banking tech firms are trash talking over how mobile remote deposit capture should be offered, though their real dispute is about who can best calm the nerves of banks worried about missing out on the high demand for mobile RDC because of time to market issues.

Andrew Tilbury, a director for Bluepoint Solutions, says mobile RDC “should be fully integrated with a mobile banking app-period… from the user experience side of things, you don’t want to have multiple applications to manage,” he says, adding his firm’s only had one client that was interested in mobile RDC only.

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By Andrew Tilbury

Originally appeared at CUTimes.com, February 25, 2011

Most analysts and experts agree 2011 is the year mobile capture goes mainstream. In fact, I predict within two years this service offering will be as ubiquitous as online banking and bill pay. Your members will demand it, and statistics demonstrate that some members will even go so far as to switch financial institutions if the service isn’t offered at their current institution.

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By Marc Rapport, originally published by Credit Union Times, December 20, 2010

As Check 21 wraps up its first decade, its impact has been considerable, to the point where the Federal Reserve has but one site left for processing [paper] checks…

The Check Clearing Act for the 21st Century “Check 21″ was passed by Congress in October 2003 and took effect a year later.

Then in 2010, remote-deposit capture went mobile, as vendors and financial institutions that saw a market for it hastened to get the service onto BlackBerry, Android and iPhone platforms, further extending to consumers the conveniences that had been reserved for the enterprise itself.

“The cost of handling paper checks is getting so much lower than it used to be that I think we may see a renaissance in their use and in checking accounts,” [Bluepoint CEO Hal] Tilbury said. “They’re also easier to secure against fraud than a debit card.”

“I see equal lines forming to get mobile and home capture solutions and I see teller capture taking over a lot of the back-office work associated with branch capture, but I don’t see checks going away anytime soon.”

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By Kevin Jepson, originally published by Credit Union Journal, December 13, 2010

Mobile deposits are “cool,” but more importantly, they whet member appetite for mobile payments, according to Tony Rasmussen, SVP-eServices at Mountain America Credit Union (MACU) here, which will launch mobile deposit services for Android and iPhone devices early next year.

MACU’s mobile deposit is also pretty cool on the back end, noted Rasmussen. Incoming check images from mobile deposit are securely transmitted to the same location as check images from MACU’s other capture applications, including teller, home and, eventually, ATM.

The “convergence” of deposit images from mobile, teller, home and ATMs is enabled by the Bluepoint Solutions’ ImagePoint Hub, a central repository for check processing, said Rasmussen. MACU uses Bluepoint’s mobile and teller remote deposit capture (RDC) software and will soon switch to Bluepoint’s home capture product…

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By Marc Rapport, originally published by Credit Union Times, December 1, 2010

Check 21 provider Bluepoint Solutions is offering more than a thousand natural person credit unions free upgrades and immediate transition to a direct license for its services…

Said Hal Tilbury, CEO and founder of Bluepoint Solutions, “The goal of the program is to allow these credit unions to continue using our solution that they know and trust…”

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By Will Hernandez, originally published by American Banker, August 24, 2010

Checks may be getting an extended life now that financial institutions are developing and rolling out mobile remote deposit capture technology as part of their mobile banking applications, observers said.

“Check volume is declining, but why would it decline if [banks] make it really easy to deposit” checks, said Nicole Sturgill, the research director for delivery channels at TowerGroup.

Mobile remote deposit capture helps banks start processing checks without the branch traffic and assists with fraud protection, said Andrew Tilbury, a Bluepoint spokesman. “All those things are going to drive the cost of a check down,” he said.

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By Marc Rapport, originally published by Credit Union Journal, August 18, 2010

Home remote deposit capture is the latest tool in the chest for Summit Credit Union as it competes for members, SEG by SEG.

The $125 million Greensboro, N.C.-based organization operates seven branches in four cities across the Piedmont, and being able to tell prospective members they can deposit their checks with a simple scanner at home is definitely a good thing, said Glenn Kirk, Summit’s executive vice president of marketing.

“My job is to try to get new companies to join with us and one of the first things the CEO or HR people ask me is,  ‘Where is the closest branch?’” Kirk said. “When I tell them all they need is a scanner and a highspeed Internet connection, I often hear, ‘holy cow.’ There’s a real wow factor.”

With ATMs and shared branching, there are plenty of places to make withdrawals, but making deposits can often be another story. “This just closes the loop,” Kirk said.

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By Marc Rapport, originally published by Credit Union Times, August 18, 2010

• Credit unions may find themselves choosing between back-office and teller check capture.
• Some industry participants say the shift is to the teller option, others say they haven’t seen it.
• Each option has its own characteristics, and the choice involves member service questions as much as technology options.

Institutions can find themselves facing two options: capture the images and truncate them by the batch in the back shop at the branch or a centralized location, or capture them at the teller line as the transaction is occurring.

Those who are worried about slowing down the action at the window, where tellers might better spend their time providing personal service rather than scanning checks, prefer the back shop option, and that’s where most credit unions are now in the Check 21 process.

He [Randy Glassburn, CEO of Ball State FCU] also said that he had heard concerns about teller capture slowing down teller lines but that that had not been his credit union’s experience.

“If you are doing it properly, it really is a matter of seconds in terms of the time difference,” he said.  “Compared to the time it takes to scan checks at the end of the day, and the time associated with tracking down fraudulent items or correcting errors after the member has left the credit union, those few extra seconds are really a non-issue.”

The article continues to examine the various options through interviews with ProfitStars, Aite, Bluepoint Solutions client Ball State FCU, Wescom Resources Group, VSoft and Open Solutions. Randy Glassburn, CEO of Ball State is cited:

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Bluepoint Solutions has been offering best-of-breed software technology solutions to banks and credit unions since 2000. Our goal of participating in your institution’s success as a trusted technology partner is borne out by our highly trained Technical Account Management (TAM) group. The TAMs provide ongoing technical support, including both proactive monitoring of all Bluepoint systems and reactive incident support.

Recently, Bluepoint reached a milestone achievement with the launch of an automated proactive monitoring system, custom developed for use by the TAM group to help our customers maximize their technology investment with Bluepoint’s solutions and systems. This proactive monitoring system will replace the current manual processes to maintain Bluepoint solutions, making our operations and response times even faster and more accurate.

Unlike standalone disk space monitors or SQL Agent Jobs trackers, Bluepoint’s proactive monitoring tool does not require your staff to install or maintain any new processes. It is specifically designed around our systems and will efficiently inform your TAM about any upcoming risks to those systems. Your TAM will continue to manage your system in a completely hands-off model for your institution. In addition, your TAM now has instant access to all information about your system functionality at any given moment.

Bluepoint knows that nothing stops your business faster than a key technology system going down. Effects will be felt immediately by your employees and account holders alike through reduced efficiency, productivity and service response-time.

Typical system failures arise from running out of memory and/or reaching usage capacity. Automated reporting that runs in the background is also a high-risk function because it might be days or even weeks before it’s caught. Ultimately these failures result in the loss of data which can be costly or impossible to recreate. All of these are easily prevented, if levels and efficiency are monitored regularly.

Included in the monitoring provided by Bluepoint is:

• Hard drive (includes local and NAS/SAN devices) capacity and disk usage - can be used to do trend analysis on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
• SQL Agent jobs – reports on success and failure of all functions.
• ODOC and DART storage pools – sends notification when it gets low, based on parameters set for each institution’s individual usage trends.
• Licenses – tracks the number of licenses used vs. licenses purchased, which allows you to make use of each license and order more, if necessary, before you run out.

Through years of support experience, our team has developed an intuitive system, capable of tracking trends for each institution’s use. As part of our personal management, each institution’s assigned TAM is able to accurately forecast upcoming usage and potential failure-points well in advance. As a result, your institution will avoid facing emergency outages and the resulting expense and inconvenience, and you can plan for costly IT infrastructure upgrades. By mitigating the risk of service interruptions to both internal and external customers you will gain increased employee productivity and enhanced customer satisfaction. By providing, and constantly upgrading, this combination of technology and support, Bluepoint has ensured highly efficient system operations for our customers and has secured an extraordinary 95% contract renewal rate.