Vista, Calif. July 1, 2010  NET Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Scranton, Penn., today announced its selection of Bluepoint Solutions’ ImagePoint Teller Capture and Receipt Manager solutions. Bluepoint Solutions is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and leading innovator in remote deposit capture (RDC), image-based item processing and enterprise content management software technology for financial institutions.

“Our tagline is ‘Banks have customers; here you’re family. Welcome home!’ We are truly here for the members’ benefit, and ImagePoint Teller with Receipt Manager will help us to serve them even better,” said John Errico, vice president of finance at NET. “We looked at other remote deposit capture solutions in the past, but they lacked the research capabilities that really make ImagePoint Teller Capture and Receipt Manager stand out.  Our current research and balance process is highly manual and paper-based, which results in increased overtime and unmanageable workloads. Following the implementation of the modern teller capture platform, the workloads will be streamlined, the overtime eliminated, resulting in significant cost and time savings for the credit union.”

NET Federal Credit Union operates two branches, has more than 21,000 members and $157 million in assets. In addition to the efficiencies gained on the teller line, the credit union anticipates faster and more accurate balancing, as well as a reduction in fraud by catching questionable items before they ever enter the institution.
Errico continued, “The recent changes to Reg CC, the Expedited Funds Availability Act, means all checks are now local. With our current process, the time it takes to clear a check gives sophisticated fraudsters ample opportunity visit several other branches and make the same fraudulent deposit. Having Bluepoint’s teller capture will enable us to capture documents at the point-of-presentment and immediately verify them, making fraud more difficult – protecting the credit union and our members.”

ImagePoint Teller Capture enables the capture of items at the teller line, increasing efficiency and accuracy by reducing time spent on manual data entry and preventing human error. It verifies, processes and balances checks in real time, making information available more quickly than traditional options. Receipt Manager integrates with the existing teller transaction flow, storing the receipt data with the check image electronically and making them searchable and available to authorized users throughout the entire credit union.

“More and more credit unions, like NET, are realizing the significant advantages to be gained by implementing teller capture solutions,” said CEO and founder, Hal Tilbury. “We understand the challenges facing credit union executives and as a result, our ImagePoint teller capture platform is uniquely designed to lower costs and streamline workflow, all while improving member-service.  As a member-centered organization, NET will benefit from the increased efficiency that ImagePoint Teller Capture and Receipt Manager provide, because it means that their time will be spent with members rather than paperwork. We look forward to working with them in the coming years.”

By Hal Tilbury

Community banks have invested significant time, resources and money to achieve the goal of a paperless environment, sometimes only to recoup a minimal return on their technology investment. As a result, many have given up on enterprise content management (ECM) and dismissed these solutions as costly but necessary. After working with community financial institutions for more than a decade, Bluepoint Solutions has developed 10 industry best practices that have proven to greatly reduce costs, improve employee productivity and enhance customer service.

1. Use customer-centric filing.
2. Make it intuitive and easy to use.
3. Keep electronic content electronic.
4. Capture content at the point of presentment.
5. Eliminate manual indexing.
6. Have content immediately available.
7. Have a universal content repository.
8. Aim for life-cycle management.
9. Allow for disaster recovery.
10. Record customer interactions.

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Vista, Calif.  May 18, 2010. Bluepoint Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and leading innovator in remote deposit capture (RDC), image-based item processing and enterprise content management software technology for financial institutions, today announced its ImagePoint Teller, Receipt Manager and FD Master products have been verified as Citrix Ready®. The Citrix Ready program helps customers identify third-party solutions that are recommended to enhance virtualization, networking and cloud computing solutions from Citrix Systems, Inc. Bluepoint’s teller capture, transaction imaging and document management solutions completed a rigorous verification process to ensure compatibility with Citrix XenApp5, providing confidence with joint solution compatibility.

The Citrix Ready program makes it easy for customers to identify complementary products and solutions that can enhance Citrix environments. Customers can be confident that ImagePoint Teller, Receipt Manager and FD Master have successfully passed a series of tests established by Citrix and can be trusted to work effectively with XenApp 5.

ImagePoint Teller enables the easy and efficient capture of check images at the teller line, resulting in additional cost savings, operational efficiencies, fraud prevention possibilities and improved service to account holders. Receipt Manager integrates with the existing teller transaction flow, storing the receipt data electronically and making it available to authorized users throughout the entire institution. FD Master offers a flexible, easy-to-access and speedy interface for scanning and importing documents and data to a robust, object-oriented database.

Citrix Ready products are featured in an online catalog at www.citrixready.com and carry the Citrix Ready logo.
“As a member of the Citrix Ready Program, we are able to offer our customers intelligent solutions that combine our products with the Citrix XenApp 5 product,” said Hal Tilbury, president and chief executive officer of Bluepoint Solutions. “The offering clearly demonstrates our plans to work closely with trusted partners, through the Citrix Ready partner ecosystem, in order to provide the highest quality experience for our customers.”

There is a software delivery method that has the potential to transform the way your financial institution operates.  It can expand your customer base, allow you to offer more services faster and at a lower cost, and differentiate you from your competitors.

What is this revolutionary technology?  SaaS.

SaaS — which stands for :Software-as-a-Service” — is the biggest tech buzz term of 2010 (so far.)  Discussed behind board room doors as much as it is on convention floors, it is the topic of frequent articles in technology magazines, trade journals, and industry publications.  In fact, in a July 2009 Aite Group survey of 80 North American bank CIO’s, 45% of participants stated that increased use of SaaS would be “Somewhat to Very Important” to their institution’s cost reduction strategy over the next 24 months.  SaaS is especially attractive to large banks that have traditionally been slower to embrace this model.

What is the buzz all about?  And, more importantly, how can it benefit your institution?

Applications On Demand
SaaS is a model of software deployment whereby an application is licensed by a customer for use as a service on demand.  The application can be uploaded to the customer’s device but it is often hosted on servers controlled by the software provider.  This latter method is frequently referred to as cloud computing, since the application is hosted offsite and accessed remotely.

The SaaS method of deployment has several advantages, most notably cost savings experienced from not having to buy expensive equipment and software licenses, savings on staffing and maintenance, and real-time data backup in case of natural disaster or equipment failure.  SaaS is a departure from traditional licensing which requires financial institutions to purchase licenses for software that they are subsequently responsible for installing and maintaining.

The popularization of internet-based applications has fueled the popularity of the SaaS model.  Instead of software licenses being purchased, they are now “rented” from a vendor for a fixed period of time.  There are several benefits to a SaaS deployment that  impact financial institutions of all sizes, but due to their economies of scale, they can have a more significant impact on small to medium-sized institutions.

The Need for Speed
Launching new account holder services as fast as possible is vital to stay ahead of your competition.  It is also key to retaining existing customers and attracting new ones.  The necessity of deploying a new service quickly creates a daunting new technical project that falls upon the shoulders of your IT department.  IT departments are often understaffed, overworked, and overburdened.  Financial institutions — especially the smaller to medium sized ones — are not usually equipped with the resources required to quickly install, integrate, test and maintain a new technology.

This is the first area where a SaaS solution can have a major impact on getting a new technology up and running.  Whereas with an in-house solution you are dependent upon your IT department, with a SaaS solution this responsibility falls upon the vendor you have selected to provide the service.  This frees up your IT department to work on other projects and cuts the time required for launching your new service.

Integrating a new technology into an institution’s existing network is typically a labor-intensive and time-consuming process.  With SaaS, the vendor provides all hosting and maintenance giving the institution a working solution that requires little effort from its IT department.  This allows the institution — even one with limited IT resources — to offer more services to its customers faster and at a lower cost.

Pay-as-you-Go
The upfront cost is the single, greatest obstacle to a financial institution deploying a new technology.  With an in-house solution, the entire cost of the software and hardware is paid up front.  Depending on the application, this can represent an expenditure of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Many financial institutions are currently experiencing a shortage of capital, and such a huge expense makes initiatives for implementing new technologies difficult to financially justify.

With SaaS, the upfront expense is considerably lessened.  Instead of having a single, huge initial payment, payments are based on the amount of usage of the application, so the financial institution only pays as much as it uses the service.  This has a significant impact on the cash-flow requirements of the application, and can ease the burden of acquiring the new technology.

Mitigate Your Risk
There are so many new customer-facing technologies available to financial institutions that it is impossible to know which are worthwhile and which are a waste of time.  Home capture, mobile capture, personal financial management tools, mobile banking applications are just a few of the new technologies available.  Many of them so new that there is considerable uncertainty surrounding the adoption rate among customers.  That represents a significant risk to executives who are trying to steer clear of investing scarce capital and resources in a technology that might never get off the ground.

Herein lies the third major benefit to deploying new technology in a SaaS environment.  Since the cost of a SaaS solution is typically based on the amount of usage and is spread over the life of the technology, if your particular customer does not widely adopt a technology, the loss is relatively small compared to if you had chosen the in-house method.  The financial risk is thus greatly reduced whereas if a license was purchased upfront, the entire cost of that license would have been a waste.

The Takeaway
Freeing up IT resources within your institution, minimizing the upfront cost of deployment and ongoing maintenance, and scaling back the risk of taking a chance on a new technology are the three major benefits of choosing a cloud computing model for your next new technology.  The unique characteristics of the SaaS deployment method will allow your institution to decrease the lead time and cost of offering new services to your customers.  Additionally, a broader service offering can be a key differentiation point with competitors that allows you to attract new customers.  There will always be situations where deploying in-house makes sense, especially if there is a strong desire within your institution to own your technology.  However, if time to market, cost, and risk are important factors in your decision to implement a new technology, you should take a serious look at your SaaS options.

Smaller credit unions face unique challenges to implementing document management solutions, including small IT departments, lack of expertise and resources. Bluepoint Solutions’ CEO and Founder, Hal Tilbury, discusses the company’s unique application services contract offering that enables credit unions with virtually no IT department to implement sophisticated enterprise content management solutions.

By Andrew Tilbury

When home capture first hit the market, it generated considerable buzz among credit union executives.  Several salient questions emerged from the discussion.  Would home capture evolve into a wide-spread technology or would it remain a niche product?  Would fraud be so significant as to make the application pointless?  Would anyone use it once it was offered?  And, most importantly, would it be a good fit for my credit union’s members?

In the Fall of 2009, Bluepoint Solutions conducted an in-depth study focused on credit unions and remote deposit capture solutions.  We took a random sampling of credit unions with assets ranging from $100 million to $1 billion and asked what remote capture points of presentment they were currently using and what plans they had for implementing home capture.  Over 200 credit unions participated in our study and the results shed light on the future of home capture.

52% of the respondents surveyed indicated that they had a remote capture solution in place:  63% use branch capture, 20% use teller, and 9% use ATM capture.  Only 4% use merchant capture and another 4% use home capture.  This indicates that remote deposit capture is at the beginning of its life cycle.  As credit union executives realize the efficiencies they can gain by capturing check images at the first possible point of presentment, there will be a steady increase in the use of remote deposit capture solutions.

When asked about future plans for implementing home capture, 42% of the respondents said they already had initiatives in place to offer home capture.  Another 46% were exploring it, but had not yet decided whether they would ultimately proceed with installation.  Considering the high amount of interest in home capture, credit unions should, at the very least, take a serious look at home capture and ask whether or not it is a service that will appeal to their members.

Convenience for Your Members, Growth for Your Credit Union
It is clear that credit unions see an industry-wide movement toward home capture, but why is the technology so appealing to end-users?  The overarching reason is convenience.  Home capture eliminates trips to the branch or the ATM, working around branch hours and holidays, waiting in line at the branch, and finding an ATM.  Customers like the flexibility of making deposits any time, from any place.

In addition to the benefits to consumers, home capture has significant benefits for credit unions.  Take Digital Federal Credit Union as an example.  They launched their home capture solution “PC Deposit” in March 2008, and within a year had 15% of their member base sign up for the service.  They receive about 9,000 deposits per month totaling about $13.5 million.  This has created an entirely new channel for receiving deposits from members.1   Another good example is USAA.  After they launched their home capture application “Deposit@Home” in 2005, they experienced a near-doubling of their deposit growth.2  Both of these examples show the dramatic and positive impact that home capture can have on a credit union’s growth strategy.  Both of these show how a credit union can use this technology not only to fulfill a demand from their members, but also to increase deposits, retain existing members, and attract more members.

Risky Business?
It sometimes seems that the newer the technology, the more prevalent the fraud associated with it.  However, with home capture, this is not the case.  There are established risk mitigation strategies in place that credit unions can effectively use to reduce instances of fraud.

The first strategy is to apply know-your-customer (KYC) best practices.  Many credit unions use KYC techniques to identify various groups within their membership who are their low-risk customers.  This is typically done with a combination of criteria such as age of account, overall member relationship, history of returned items, and general account history.  You can apply these standards to segment your members and then offer home capture as a premium service to select members.

In addition to KYC methods, a viable home capture solution must have integrated fraud mitigation that includes duplicate detection and CAR/LAR validation.  This is done by using a single, real-time database for all deposited items, regardless of the original point-of-presentment.  Using a combination of a KYC, duplicate detection, and CAR/LAR validation, you can create a robust system for mitigating fraud that covers all points of presentment, including home capture.

Is Home Capture the Right Fit for Your Members?
How will you know if your membership will respond well to home capture?  There are a few key indicators that will give you a glimpse of potential adoption rates.  Are your members spread over a wide geographic area?  Do they typically live a long distance from a branch?  Do you receive a disproportionately large amount of deposits in the mail?  Do your members frequently use online banking, bill pay, and mobile banking?  Is your membership based on a certain occupation that requires them to be mobile or move frequently?  Does your typical member fit a younger, technologically savvy demographic profile?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you should closely examine implementing a home capture solution.   If not, you run the risk of missing a major opportunity to provide a valuable service to your members, and this could create a service gap that could be filled by a competing financial institution.

Licensing vs. Outsourcing
Even after applying relevant business cases, there may still be uncertainty surrounding the projected adoption rates of home capture among consumers.  This has made credit union executives and boards reluctant to invest in a technology with no proven track record.

One way to address this challenge is to outsource home capture to a third party provider.  This software-as-a-service model eliminates the upfront cost of licenses and takes the strain off of your IT department.  This allows you to bring home capture to market quickly and test the response among your membership.  It is a pay-as-you-go model that typically involves a nominal setup cost and a small per-item processing fee.  However, if you are confident that your members will respond positively to home capture, licensing is probably the better option.  The upfront costs will be higher, but, in the long run, your credit union will benefit from full-ownership of the technology and lower per-item processing costs.

Final Thought
Evaluating home capture for your membership is a simple but essential process.  You must first decide if your credit union’s members will respond to the technology and, second, if you can use it as an effective tool in your marketing and growth strategy to prevent members from defecting to other institutions and also using it to attract new members.  The one thing you cannot do is ignore it.

Originally published by Callahan & Associates in Technology@CU, 3Q09

Bluepoint Solutions’ Chief Marketing Officer, Dick Drew comments on cloud computing architecture, stating that cloud computing will enable “many financial companies to get the benefits without making the capital investment.”  Click here to view the article in its entirety.

by Hal Tilbury, President & CEO of Bluepoint Solutions

Community based financial institutions are looking for ways to improve and/or maintain margins.  One approach is to grow deposits, but a more promising method is to focus on cost-reduction areas. One area is the institution’s electronic document management system. Thousands of institutions are saddled with first-generation document management systems.  These legacy systems may have initially helped reduce paper, but are now labor intensive with centralized scanning and manual indexing. This older technology can lead to input errors of up to three percent, which are time-consuming, expensive, and lead to poor customer service.

For example, how often does your institution receive an electronic document, print it and then scan it into the document management system?  Second-generation document management systems that follow proven best practices streamline this traditionally cumbersome process.  Such a system reduces costs, improves employee productivity and customer service.  Maintaining digital documents in a digital format, such as receipts, e-mail messages, Word documents, statements and reports significantly increase employee productivity.

Re-engineering business processes from a centralized scanning model to a decentralized model, where documents are captured at the point of presentment, reduces errors, costs and lost data.   Using this method, documents are available in the most active time of a document’s life: the first 24 to 48 hours.  How many secondary file systems live within your institution while documents are sent to the centralized scanning department?

Additionally, best practices dictate checks should be captured as early in the process as possible.  Both consumers and businesses can now use RDC (remote deposit capture) to digitize checks in a convenient self-service manner, reducing branch traffic.  Institutions that capture items at the teller window reduce overtime courier costs and are able to more quickly catch fraudulent items.

Bluepoint’s document management technology is based on best practices. We have developed an industry-leading next generation document management system utilizing Microsoft technology.  SharePoint, SQL, Windows are all critical components of the overall system that will reduce cost and improve margin.  A simple document management assessment will determine if you are a candidate to improve your margin through the use of a second generation document management system.

Bank gains real-time clearing of checks and improved customer service

Boston, Nov. 05, 2009. Bluepoint Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and leading innovator in remote deposit capture (RDC), image-based item processing and electronic document management software technology for financial institutions, announced during the BAI Retail Delivery conference and expo that Springfield-Mass.-based Hampden Bank (NASDAQ, HBNK) has selected Open Solutions’ tMagic Teller Capture platform. A full-service community financial institution, Hampden Bank has approximately $568 million in assets and nine branch locations.

Built on Bluepoint’s modern, .NET teller capture technology,the tMagic platform is fully integrated with Open Solutions’ relational core data processing platforms, The Complete Banking Solution®: DNA and The Complete Credit Union Solution®: DNA.  The teller capture solution is seamlessly integrated with a core data processing platform, enabling tellers to easily capture and process checks during the initial customer interaction, decreasing the amount of time and keystrokes needed for each transaction.

According to Senior Vice President of Information Technology and Operations for Hampden Bank, Sheryl Shinn, the bank evaluated multiple image capture and item processing strategies and ultimately selected teller capture for three primary reasons: reduction in costs and expenses; improved customer service and increased operational efficiencies. The bank is moving from a centralized branch image capture model to a distributed teller capture environment, gaining advantages afforded by capturing at one of the earliest points of presentment, the teller window.

“By capturing items at the teller line, we will be able to eliminate several cumbersome end-of-day processes resulting in significant cost-savings and the elimination of unnecessary expenses. All exception items will now be managed at the teller line at the time of transaction, virtually eliminating processing fees, since there will be no need to reject, balance and repair items at the end of the day. Additionally, teller capture will provide revenue opportunities for the bank including a per item deposit fee on business accounts, increased interest income from the ability to cut multiple cash letters during the day and finally, on-us items will be automatically processed when scanned and credited to the bank’s general ledger.”

The bank also anticipates several customer-facing benefits following the implementation of teller capture. “Our tellers will be able to better focus their attention on building relationships with our customers, versus simply processing transactions,” continued Shinn. “Much of the traditional teller-work will be automated and we anticipate an 80 percent reduction in keystrokes. Not only will this allow the teller more time to better serve our customers, but will also drastically reduce the chance for human error. Missing signatures or dates, insufficient funds, duplicate items and closed accounts will be detected immediately, alerting the teller and the customer that there is a potential problem with the transaction. Once the transaction is completed, all documents are immediately available to view electronically anywhere in the bank, making research and answering customer requests for information an easy task to accomplish for any of the bank’s staff.”

“The increasing costs of processing paper checks are driving more and more institutions to explore remote deposit capture solutions,” said Hal Tilbury, founder and CEO of Bluepoint Solutions. “Proven industry best practices continue to point to teller capture as the more sophisticated methodology for capturing and processing check images. We believe teller capture will ultimately emerge as the preferred solution given the long-term savings and immediate customer service benefits. While many financial institutions continue to take a ‘wait and see’ approach, innovative banks like Hampden will garner significant competitive advantages in today’s financial environment.”

About Bluepoint Solutions
Vista, Calif.-based Bluepoint Solutions is a leading innovator in remote deposit capture (RDC), image-based item processing, electronic document management and receipt management. Adhering to strict best practice standards, Bluepoint delivers proven technology solutions and consulting services designed to achieve the strategic goals of increased employee productivity, reduced operating costs, and improved customer service. Bluepoint’s family of products and services offer a complete, end-to-end, image-based item capture and payment processing solution. For more information, visit www.bluepointsolutions.com.

To continue to receive the benefits of efficiency and cost saving created by these strategies, don’t forget to do everything possible to make the entire system easy for people to learn and use and easy for your IT department to maintain.

Simplify all user interfaces and make them straightforward to use, with hot-keys, mouse functions, clear layouts, and other tools used by GUI designers.

Finally, consider the ease with which your IT department and its contractors can respond to user questions, make minor changes and regular upgrades, and administer remotely.