Image Exchange Hits Key Milestones at SVPCO, Viewpointe

Two milestones announced this week indicate the rapidly growing adoption of image exchange for check processing. SVPCO, which handles paper checks and runs an image exchange network as part of the New York-based The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC, announced on Tuesday that imaged items exceeded paper checks in both number of items and dollar value for the first time in April. Separately, Viewpointe Archive Services LLC said it had exceeded the 100-billion mark in the number of check images now stored in what it says is the largest such archive in the world. SVPCO, which last week said its April image-exchange volume had climbed 450% from April 2006, to 193.9 million items, saw its paper check volume account for 49% of items in the month, compared to 51% for image. The dollar value of imaged items had already surpassed that of paper checks in January. In April, imaged checks accounted for $18.2 billion in average daily value, or 54.5% of the total. The news comes in the wake of reports last week that total image-exchange volume for all networks had quintupled in the 12 months through March, to 616.4 million items, and now accounts for about one-fifth of all checks cleared. “This is a truly historic milestone for the banking industry because the volume of paper check exchange handled by The Clearing House has now been surpassed for the first time and it's unlikely to represent a majority of check volume again,” said Jerry Milano, a senior vice president at The Clearing House, in a statement. Milano is responsible for the company's paper check business. Viewpointe announced on Monday its archive is growing at the rate of 100 million items per day. At this rate, it said, its collection should double to 200 billion items in three years. It took six years to reach 100 billion. Viewpointe allows its member banks to share electronic check images rather than swap paper items in a retrieval process it says takes less than a second. The company also provides an image-exchange network. Both The Clearing House and Viewpointe serve many of the nation's largest financial institutions. Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., US Bancorp, and Wells Fargo & Co. participate in both SVPCO's image-exchange network and in Viewpointe's archive. “It's rare in our industry to see so many institutions coming together to make such a milestone possible,” said Lou Buglioli, Viewpointe's chief executive, in a statement concerning the 100-billion-item mark. The 100 billion images in the archive amount to 15 petabytes of storage, Viewpointe says. Put another way, the images would circle the earth 381 times if laid end to end.