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Prepared by Gail Wean, CFO MacDill FCU

MacDill Federal Credit Union ($1.6 billion; 177,854 members; Tampa, FL) is the first credit union to instantly present check deposits to the Check 21 clearinghouse as the member waits at the teller counter.

Our tellers scan an electronic image of the check when the member presents it, complete an automated check for fraud, and then transmit the image directly to the item processor – all in real time. This Teller Capture will save our credit union $350,000 per year, mainly by reducing check float. Our C21 Teller Capture solution is provided by Bluepoint Solutions, Inc.

Each check goes instantaneously from the member’s hands to the check processor. Back items or fraudulent checks are identified before the member walks away from the teller line. Teller Capture only keeps the member waiting about two seconds longer per check.

We are processing about 95 percent of all checks from our 18 branches with Teller Capture. Our members’ ATM check deposits are processed through a batch capture solution.

Before our C21 Teller Capture solution was implemented in June 2006, we manually encoded all checks, prepared a daily cash letter and sent checks by courier, first to headquarters, and then to the Federal Reserve. We wanted to improve our efficiency, and our biggest barrier was the float time presented by physically transporting all checks back to our central location.

Today, we have installed 134 Teller Capture workstations for tellers and card services representatives – and an additional 200 licenses of research software. Batch capture solutions have also been installed at each of our branches for processing single deposits that contain a large quantity of checks.

Our Teller Capture works in tandem with Bluepoint’s Receipt Manager, which can capture electronic signatures and create an instant record of each transaction. The electronic receipt is then immediately available to any of our authorized employees.

Now our tellers have a second pair of eyes, as these solutions working together can catch errors related to data entry, reconciling, and signatures. Our tellers used to discover, during end-of-the-day reconciling, that member signatures were missing all the time, which the teller would then have to void the relevant transactions and contact each of our members to request their signatures. Now everything is caught immediately at the point of data entry.

Tellers also save time during the process because they don’t have to manually stamp or add checks. As a result, our tellers love it because it eliminates their balancing work at the end of the day. If a teller makes a mistake when entering transaction data, for instance, the Check 21 tools alert the teller at that moment.

Saving $350,000 per year, eliminating fraud, creating instant records of each transaction, vastly reducing end-of-day tasks for our tellers, our Check 21 solution was a wise investment that will continue to pay dividends for us well into the future.