Weeding Through the Options

Kalen Holliday
June, 2005
Community Banker

Following are are excerpts taken from the June, 2005 issue of Community Banker.

Check 21, or the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, has been a boon for check imaging providers, many of which are rolling out new offerings this year. While Check 21 does not require banks to image or electronically transfer checks, the act, which took effect October 28, 2004, does require them to accept substitute checks, or electronic images of checks, as the legal equivalent of paper checks.

To help bankers weed through the jungle of check image vendor options, Community Banker compiled a service guide to a dozen well-established players in the check imaging arena, each with a presence in the community banking space.

Like the State of Texas that it calls home, Dallas-based Carreker Corp. tends to like things big. Texans boast that their state’s capitol building is taller than the U.S. Capitol, and Carreker points out that its core customer base is made up of top-50 U.S. banks.

Although less than 10 percent of Carreker’s clients are community banks, the company believes that its experience serving big players makes it a powerful provider for smaller banks, too.

“We’ve established our applications in a rigorous environment,” said Darrell Royal, Carreker’s executive vice president. “Therefore, we can easily scale to less demanding, smaller-volume companies.”

Most of the technology that Carreker represents originated in the mid-1990s. It was originally created by Check Solutions, a company Carreker acquired in 2000 that had been owned by IBM and was key in developing the technology behemoth’s check imaging platform.

Carreker promotes the breadth of its offerings, noting that anything ascribed to check imaging, such as image statement, exceptions and returns, is in its product portfolio.

The company offers remote capture at some of its large clients, and plans to provide more source capture products later this year. Carreker is also focusing on unified payments processing.

Royal noted that pressure is increasing to move various applications onto one core platform, and to migrate to real-time processing, unifying all payment types and sources.

Vendors that offer remote services, such as offshore key entry, and provide banks with the ability to become increasingly “virtual,” will have an advantage over competitors, Royal said.