Credit union adds teller, home, merchant and ATM capture options

VISTA, Calif. and Charleston, S.C. March 16, 2010. South Carolina Federal Credit Union announced that it has selected Bluepoint Solutions’ ImagePointTM Capture and Hub modules to electronically capture and aggregate check images. Bluepoint Solutions is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and innovator in remote deposit capture (RDC), image-based item processing and enterprise content management software technology for financial institutions.

Headquartered in Charleston, S.C., South Carolina Federal has approximately $1.3 billion in assets. The credit union operates 19 branches plus a lending center and offers 75 ATMs to serve its growing member base. Currently the credit union serves more than 150,000 members. South Carolina Federal plans to implement teller capture, merchant/business member capture, home/member capture and ATM capture, as well as ImagePoint Hub for aggregation and forward presentment of items. The credit union also selected Bluepoint’s Receipt Manager with Transaction Manager for advanced research.

“The implementation of Bluepoint’s suite of products will allow South Carolina Federal Credit Union to continue delivering on our brand promise ‘providing convenience to members,” said Joe Grech, chief financial officer, South Carolina Federal. “Allowing members to deposit checks from their home or business offers another LifeSimplified tool for members to connect with us. Additionally, we estimate a $500,000 savings annually in operating expenses from the implementation of Bluepoint solutions. This in turn can be used to develop new products and services that give members more convenient access to the credit union and their money.”

Additionally, the credit union cited the ease of integration with its existing core platform and the ability to purchase all points of capture from one provider as key factors in the decision. South Carolina Federal will be able to capture checks in real-time and at the point of presentment (teller, home/business, ATM) improving operational efficiencies, cost savings, fraud prevention and the overall member experience. Receipt Manager integrates with the existing teller transaction flow, by storing the receipt data and check image together electronically, while all captured images, regardless of point of presentment, are aggregated in ImagePoint Hub. Storing every image electronically at the point of presentment makes them available to authorized users throughout the entire credit union, reducing the research time needed to answer member inquiries.

“Bluepoint remains committed to helping credit unions leverage proven best practices, like capturing documents at the point of presentment, to not only save money, time and resources, but also improve the overall member experience,” said Hal Tilbury, founder and CEO of Bluepoint Solutions. “Given the current climate in the financial industry, we believe more and more credit unions will follow South Carolina’s lead and replace existing legacy capture solutions with sophisticated remote deposit capture strategies that leverage capturing items at the initial point of presentment. We look forward to working with the team at South Carolina Federal Credit Union.”

About South Carolina Federal
South Carolina Federal Credit Union is headquartered in North Charleston and serves more than 150,000 members that own and belong to the not-for-profit financial cooperative, which has over $1.3 billion in assets. South Carolina Federal is a community-chartered credit union. Anyone who lives, works, worships or attends school in Dorchester, Berkeley, Charleston, Orangeburg, Clarendon, Calhoun or Georgetown counties, and most of the Columbia area, is eligible to join. South Carolina Federal has 19 branches, a lending center and more than 75 ATMs throughout Charleston, Columbia, Georgetown, Orangeburg, St.Matthews and Manning. In 2008, South Carolina Federal for the second consecutive year was voted one of the Best Places to Work in the state. More information about South Carolina Federal can be found at scfederal.org or on the SiMPLE CENTS blog at simplecentsblog.org.

Fortune Favors the Brave & Those Who Lead through Offense-Defense Strategies

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 advanced fraud detection; tellers stay in balance

Vista, Calif. Oct. 14, 2009. Home City Federal Savings Bank announced it has extended its contract with Bluepoint Solutions to implement a teller capture and receipt manager solution at 10 teller workstations. The bank is upgrading from its current method of capturing deposited checks electronically at the branch or back office level to take advantage of real-time clearing, earlier fraud detection capabilities and workflow efficiencies.

Home City Federal Savings Bank is a savings association headquartered in Springfield, Ohio with more than $141 million in assets. A Bluepoint client since 2007, the bank cited Bluepoint’s customer service, ease-of-use and unique monthly pricing structure as the primary reasons for selecting Bluepoint for its teller capture platform. Bluepoint Solutions is 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.

“Initially we made the decision to implement a branch capture solution to take advantage of the significant savings afforded with the passage of Check 21,” said Donna Williams, Chief Financial Officer of Home City Federal Savings Bank. “Since implementing Bluepoint’s branch capture platform, we’ve seen a substantial reduction in courier and cashletter fees. We view the migration to a teller capture platform as the logical next step to further increase the bank’s savings and workflow efficiencies. We anticipate gaining considerable savings and advantages with real-time clearing afforded by capturing at the teller line.”

Following an extensive evaluation period, the bank determined Bluepoint’s ImagePoint Teller solution was the only platform that met all its requirements.  ImagePoint Teller is designed to help financial institutions easily and efficiently capture and process checks at the earliest point-of-presentment, the teller line. This results in additional cost savings, operational efficiencies, fraud prevention possibilities and improved customer service.

“We are looking forward to the improvements we will gain in our error and fraud detection abilities,” said Williams. “Recently, a customer deposited a check with a missing signature. This was not caught and corrected until the end of the day. Had we already implemented our teller capture platform, the system would have identified the error, alerting the teller to correct the mistake immediately. Not only does this give us an added peace of mind that errors or fraudulent attempts will be reduced, it is also a  convenience to our customers who don’t need to make another trip to the bank just to sign the check.”

The bank also selected Bluepoint’s Receipt Manager module. When combined with ImagePoint Teller Capture, the solution suite provides complete integration, storage and retrieval of all transaction information, giving the bank immediate access to receipt and check images related to deposits. This significantly reduces the time needed to research customer requests for information. “Usability was a key variable during our evaluation period,” said Williams. “Bluepoint’s solution is very easy to navigate and our tellers found it much more intuitive than the other solutions we examined. By moving to teller capture, we are positioned to gain even greater efficiencies by enabling our tellers to stay in balance throughout the day, eliminating the end-of-the-day rush to scan and balance each drawer. Additionally, tellers will now have access to comprehensive customer information including detailed deposit and other transaction information, making it easier to answer customer’s questions in a more timely and efficient manner.”

Finally, the bank is taking advantage of a unique pricing structure offered by Bluepoint. Bluepoint launched a monthly pricing program that allows financial institutions to implement a complete teller capture platform and receipt processing solution for a low monthly per-workstation fee.

“One of the primary reasons we selected Bluepoint was the extraordinary customer service and support we have received over the past two years,” said Williams. “The pricing structure is just one more example of how Bluepoint understands the needs of its customers and is willing to come up with innovative and unique programs to help banks accomplish their goals. This type of pricing model allows banks like ours to leverage modern technology offerings to better meet the needs of our customers.”

“We are pleased to partner with Home City Federal Savings Bank to implement a teller capture platform,” said Hal Tilbury, president and CEO of Bluepoint Solutions. “There are several choices in the industry and we believe it is a true testament to our product offering and our service when an existing client expands and extends their relationship. We look forward to long-standing partnership with Home City and to working together well into the future.”

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.

Logical Structuring of Information Dramatically Improves Customer Servicemand Efficiency

Does your call center still require your customers or members to wait for 24 hours to gain access to the transaction? Does a teller need to consult records in two, three or more places to process the transaction or to answer a question about it later? When the auditors arrive, how easily can you give them access to the records they need?

A robust document management system puts everything related to an account or an account-holder in one place. Once you have reduced extra paper, captured incoming paper documents electronically, and expanded your electronic document system to handle all types of documents, you are poised to organize this information in a logical structure that facilitates research and retrieval of records.

The way you use records “by account-holder” is the most logical way to store and manage information. With everything related to that customer or member in virtual folders, any document can be located right where it’s supposed to be instead of somewhere in a growing database with longer and longer search times. Record and transaction integrity is complete.

(This is the fourth strategy in a six-part series.  Check back each Friday for a new strategy to boost cost-efficiency in Financial Institutions.)

Pick up Credit Union Business’s July / August Issue for the complete article, “Captured!  RCCU Tries New Service”

In the July / August 2009 issue of Credit Union Business, Nancy Mann Jackson explores how credit unions can use Bluepoint Systems’ Remote Deposit Capture services like merchant capture attract small businesses without increasing the amount of branch traffic.  By  steering away from strict branch orientation, credit unions such as Red Crown  are able to stay competitive with much larger financial institutions by offering cutting-edge remote deposit technologies.

After exploring several different options for a merchant capture solution, Red Crown settled on Bluepoint because of it’s stable operating environment and ease of integration into their existing item processing solution.  Bluepoint’s Merchant Capture solution allowed Red Crown to avoid adding costly staff, yet it still met all of Red Crown’s strict criteria for data security and encryption — a top priority in their decision making process.

The installation went smoothly, and after an initial test with a dry cleaner business account, Red Crown is now offering merchant capture to other businesses.  According to Red Crown’s CFO, Kevin Hill, the risk associated with remote capture products — primarily duplicate scanning and validation — is dramatically reduced by applying proven methods of know your customer criteria when deciding whether or not to offer remote capture to business account holders.

Bluepoint’s Merchant Capture provides commercial accounts with the convenience of error-free balanced deposits and allows for electronic capture and remote transmittal of items from their location to yours. RDC Merchant offers financial institutions the opportunity to obtain deposits from commercial accounts at the earliest possible moment. When combined with RDC Teller and RDC Branch, Merchant capture rounds out a complete Remote Deposit Capture strategy for your financial institution.

Instant Document Capture Starts the Savings at the Point of Presentment

Imaging the documents you receive, transforming paper to electronic files, is where the savings start. It’s where many banks and credit unions have chosen as a starting point in streamlining their document management systems, and for good reason. Industry statistics show the majority of any paper document’s usefulness occurs during the first 24-48 hours after you receive it. Reduce costs during that interval and you affect your overall costs of doing business.

Moving away from centralized scanning operations to instant image capture makes documents and check images immediately available to any authorized employee, enterprise-wide. You no longer need duplicate copies at branch locations, because there is no lapse between receiving the original and having access to it both locally and centrally. And decentralized remote deposit capture is not limited to branches, but can be extended to ATMs, merchant locations or directly to consumers over secure Internet connections, which results in dramatically reduced float and branch traffic.

To the benefits of lower cost and faster access, add the elimination of physical document loss, a non- trivial ongoing headache that results in both poor customer service and wasted time for employees.

(This is the third strategy in a six-part series. Click here to see all past strategies. Check back each Friday for a new strategy to boost cost-efficiency in Financial Institutions.)

Comprehensive EDM Reduces More Than Paper

The more you are able to consolidate document storage and retrieval, the more efficiency gains you will make. Consolidating document storage means putting multiple file types from multiple sources into one database.

It also means keeping everything related to a transaction together. Consider the common practices of separating paper documents related to a simple transaction, perhaps a deposit with cash withdrawal at a teller window. Checks go here, deposit and cash tickets go there, receipts are generated, copied and put somewhere else, IDs, signature cards and even fingerprints are consulted, checks are batched for imaging and courier transport at the end of the day. The integrity of the transaction records is lost immediately. Now consider the downstream processes associated with clearing, retrieving and auditing transactions, and multiply by thousands.

Opportunities in this scenario for reducing costs, reducing errors, and reducing paper are easy to spot. A comprehensive EDM system will place all types of information in one place, including images of paper you receive, documents you generate, audio clips from your call center, and so on.
Staff time and overtime will probably be the biggest type of savings from this strategy. But even costs of clearing items can be reduced, perhaps significantly reduced, by transmitting image files for clearing multiple times per day.

(This is the second strategy in a six-part series.  The first strategy is Create Less Paper.  Check back each Friday for a new strategy to boost cost-efficiency in Financial Institutions.)

Originally published in US Banker, October 2009 issue.

by Hal Tilbury, Bluepoint Solutions

Most financial industry veterans would agree that remote deposit capture (RDC) is a game-changing development that lowered the cost of item processing. However, as the industry approaches the six-year anniversary of the passage of the Check 21 legislation, many banks still lack a sophisticated capture strategy. In fact, it was estimated at the 2009 BAI Remote Deposit Capture Summit that only 60 percent of all financial institutions have deployed branch capture technologies, and the number is substantially less for teller capture.

By the end of 2009, the Federal Reserve will have closed all but one of its paper-processing facilities, creating an imperative for banks to focus on branch or teller capture strategy before costs go up dramatically. Best practices in payments, supported by impressive ROI experiences from early-adopter installations, dictate that the most efficient mode of branch capture should be conducted at the earliest point of presentment possible: the teller line.

While most institutions recognize the workflow efficiencies of capturing items at the teller station, they discount this option because they think it is too expensive and slow. The industry has been led to believe, often by first-generation capture technology providers, that a single branch capture solution is the best strategy.

Teller capture systems provide a more efficient check processing transaction, freeing up a substantial amount of time for additional teller activity. Studies have proven that the time for standard teller capture transactions is not significantly greater, as no time is spent during any part of the workday closing out and entering batch information. Tellers no longer have to wait in line for other tellers to finish before they can scan their items. Because the tellers are up to date throughout the day, day-end processing becomes a thing of the past.

An early adopter of the teller capture technology, Grow Financial Federal Credit Union in Tampa, found the process added merely seconds to the transaction, and eliminated the need to do batch scanning at the end of the day. The time needed to balance at the end of the day fell from 15 minutes to five minutes.

Greater return on investment and increased operational efficiency is also achieved with teller capture solutions. The equipment and software cost for a branch is typically no less than the cost of licenses and scanners for about four tellers. In previous payments strategies, tellers had to leave the workstation to scan each batch. If tellers performed their scanning at the end of the day, queuing problems usually resulted. Teller capture solutions require a check scanner for each teller, which means that tellers never find themselves waiting for access to a scanner. Training sessions are also expedient and straightforward. All tellers in a branch can be fully trained in half a day.

An example of an almost immediate return on investment is how Grow Financial invested $857,000 in teller capture software and hardware, which included substitute check printing, 130 computers, the Primary Payment System and system maintenance. Grow Financial was able to eliminate three proofing machines and redeploy two full-time employees.

The system also strengthens fraud detection efforts, since the process involves intensive analysis of red flags. If a check presented at the teller line contains non-negotiable items, such as a missing signature, a discrepancy between the courtesy and legal amounts, or fraudulent information in the routing and transit line, it is addressed at that very moment. Scanning the check at the point-of-presentment also allows bank personnel to compare it to both internal and third party real-time fraud detection databases. This practice guarantees fraud reduction at the first point of capture and allows more items to be passed to the database, reducing the overall occurrences of fraud. Some of the current day fraud detection databases are delivering reductions in fraud of up to 90 percent. These results are only available if the items are scanned at the teller workstation.

The adoption of modern RDC solutions needs to increase if banks are to realize the substantial cost reductions that Check21 can deliver. In making the move to RDC it is critical that banks keep an open mind and seriously consider item capture at the teller workstation. For those banks still in the decision mode, it is not too late to select the superior and proven choice of teller capture. Those that do will almost certainly reduce their operational costs and fraud while improving customer service.

It’s Right for Operations, and Right for the Environment

“Paperless” offices have been a dream of automation experts for fifty years now. Today there is a new urgency about using paper wisely, not only to lower operating costs but to protect our precious natural resources.
Current practices for handling a newly-created document typically include printing it, perhaps with multiple copies, and then scanning it for electronic storage. Why not eliminate the printing step altogether and store it immediately? Loan documents, teller receipts, new account forms, COLD documents are just a few examples of documents that can be imported electronically without ever printing them on paper.

The more forms and other types of paper documents your electronic document management (EDM) system handles, the more you can reduce your budgets for supplies, labor, equipment, and storage space. Recent studies are starting to show the real cost of paper-based systems. It is eye-opening to consider not just the cost of the paper itself, but the cost of buying it, storing supplies of it, generating and copying it, employee time handling it through multiple processes, moving it, filing and keeping it, losing and finding it.

When institutions implement or upgrade even part of their processes, case study after case study shows the savings are many times the cost of the technology they deploy.

How does paper reduction affect customer service? Think of the delays that are reduced or eliminated by streamlining the processing of all that paperwork, from shorter teller lines to faster responses to customer service queries. And when a paper document is needed, a good EDM can produce that paper when and where the consumer wants it.

(This is the first strategy in a six-part series.  Check back each Friday for a new strategy to boost cost-efficiency in Financial Institutions.)

In the current economic environment, capturing check images at the earliest point of presentment gives financial institutions an immediate competitive advantage that directly improves the level of convenience and service they are able to offer account holders. Offering image-enabled ATMs paired with remote deposit capture (RDC) can help recruit new accounts and strengthen relationships with existing clients by offering enhanced self-service banking options at multiple remote locations. As image-enabled ATMs gain momentum among financial institutions, the institutions need to closely examine their capture and processing strategies to ensure they are not missing out on critical cost savings and operational efficiencies.

The clear advantages of RDC at the ATM are increased when the items captured at ATMs are combined with a full remote deposit capture platform. By incorporating the ATM capture component into the institution’s entire RDC platform, they will take advantage of enterprise-wide duplicate MICR detection, central archiving and research, and simplified balancing – resulting in earliest funds availability (reduced float), earlier fraud detection and reduced workload. This is a critical, yet often overlooked, component to a comprehensive ATM capture strategy.

The last component of sophisticated ATM capture strategy involves evaluating the transport services utilized to process and clear transactions. When an institution relies on a centralized transport service to move images from multiple capture points (ATM, teller, branch, merchant, consumer) to the back-end item processing solution, they can strategically time and coordinate multiple releases for clearing, resulting in earliest funds availability and savings on dollar amount or item per-transmission fees.

When integrated into the institution’s full remote deposit capture strategy, the image-enabled ATM becomes much more than just a convenience, but rather a significant savings and revenue builder for financial institutions.

To learn about more Up-and-Coming ATM Strategies read the Bank News article, featuring Bluepoint Chief Marketing Officer, Dick Drew.