Company’s teller capture, transaction imaging, document management products trusted to enhance Citrix virtualization solutions

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.”

By Andrew Tilbury

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.

Is There Any Steak Behind the Sizzle?

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

Originally Appeared in Digital Transactions: Jan. 1, 2010

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.

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.)

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.)

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.)

Safeguarding account holder records is a requirement for all financial institutions. Threats to data are as diverse as terrorist attacks, natural disasters and digital theft. After a major loss of computer records, 43% of institutions never reopen and over half close within two years of the loss*. For small to medium sized banks and credit unions, Business Continuity Planning, commonly known as BCP, can be a costly endeavor.

Several technical and operational factors must be considered when researching and selecting a data back-up and recovery solution. When these issues are examined in detail, virtualization emerges as the clear choice.

Select the lowest-cost, highest-performance backup medium.

Traditionally, magnetic tape dominated the BCP industry, but as the cost of disk space continues to fall, disk-based solutions have become increasingly popular. They offer superior encryption without requiring the delicate storage and frequent replacements of tape solutions. Most recently, virtualization as a back-up medium has become much more accessible. It offers more storage capacity, on and offsite, with fewer maintenance costs at a lower price point.  It is especially favored by small to medium size institutions with minimal technical staff to handle business continuity tasks.

Encrypt and safeguard backed-up data.

Securing sensitive data is more important today than ever. The Financial Modernization Act of 1999, also known as the “Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA),” requires every financial institution to have a security plan to protect the confidentiality and integrity of consumers’ personal information. This means that the methodology you choose for backing up data is crucial to the success of your BCP. Magnetic tape is typically not encrypted, but disk and virtual back-ups offer the benefits of encryption, ensuring tighter security.
Ensure that backed-up data can be restored to various types of hardware. Hardware systems change frequently over time. Critical data must be stored such that it can be easily restored to a variety of hardware systems, now and in the future. Both tape and disk storage are limited to restoration on the same type of hardware and operating system. Only by capturing all information in a virtual environment, below the operating system level, can you restore your entire server, its applications and data into operation-ready mode in a matter of minutes.

Ensure that data backup continues during active recovery.

A recovery and backup solution that allows your institution to handle data recovery in the background, while continuing normal business operations, is ideal. Account holders should not be inconvenienced when doing business with your institution during a recovery phase. A virtual backup can be operational within minutes of a main-server failure, ensuring minimal downtime.

Maintain technical resource requirements for a 24/7 data backup solution.

Understanding, designing, implementing and maintaining a backup system is a highly skilled practice. Additional staff with the skills and experience to execute a backup and recovery plan might be necessary, especially for small to midsized institutions. Outsourcing can be an attractive alternative, considering the impact on your ROI after calculating the costs of additional staff, equipment, maintenance and storage.

Virtual backup offers myriad benefits over other methods of data archiving. It is highly cost effective and has a lower instance of data loss than magnetic tape. It also provides a more secure archiving method than tape back-up. When taking into account the overall cost of a data backup solution, it is equally important to consider security and longevity. The ability to back up and restore data in nearly real-time provides your institution with a technological edge that your customers will appreciate.  Real-time recovery means that your clients won’t notice a disruption in service and your institution can carry on normal business operations without interruption.

Bluepoint offers the only Virtual Backup and Disaster Recovery solution to financial institutions that provides simple backup and restore, full virtualization and off-site backup storage in a hands off model, all at an affordable price. Click here to visit the product page.

*Cummings, Maeve; Haag, Stephen; and McCubbrey, Donald. 2003. Management information systems for the information age. http://highered.mcgrawhill.com/sites/0072935863/information_center_view0/

Product maximizes data backup, recovery; improves institutional productivity

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Vista, Calif. — June 9, 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 the availability of a cohesive Virtual Backup and Disaster Recovery Solution (Virtual BDR), designed to backup and virtualize multiple servers. Bluepoint is the first solutions provider in the RDC community to offer this type of service to credit union and mid-sized bank customers.

Bluepoint clients now have the capabilities of Virtual BDR to backup and restore information. According to a recent ICSA survey, U.S. businesses lose more than $12 billion per year because of data loss and 93 percent of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. If, for any reason, a file is lost or corrupt, the system retrieves the archived information, recovering the most current version of data just prior to a data loss event. In addition to its on-site backup efforts, the system offers off-site backup storage as well. The encrypted data is stored simultaneously at two off-site data centers, so in the event of a system disaster, natural or man-made, a backup server can be shipped to an institution within one day to get you back up and running without having to wait for lengthy server replacements and complicated server restores.

Findings from a recent Gartner, Inc. report reveal virtualization initiatives are changing the scope of IT management and strategy. The report also states virtualization is set to be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012. Recognizing the needs of the current market, a key component provided by the Bluepoint system is its virtualization capabilities. The device captures an image of an institution’s basic data, as often as every 15 minutes below the level of the operating system, expediting the restore time in contrast to traditional tape-backup. Lost productivity is no longer an issue, as Bluepoint has drastically reduced restore time in some cases from two to seven days down to 30 minutes.

Bluepoint’s new virtualization and disaster recovery service, via the Virtual BDR system, provides institutions with an opportunity to work with a single point of responsibility for its disaster recovery and Check 21 document initiatives, explained Hal Tilbury, president and CEO of Bluepoint Solutions. Bluepoint’s Virtual Backup and Disaster Recovery is the only solution that provides financial institutions with simple backup and restore, full virtualization and off-site backup storage in a hands off model, all at an affordable price.

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 that improve the client service experience, improve business continuity, assure disaster recovery, increase productivity and reduce the risk of fraud. 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.

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