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NetDeposit LLC, which this week announced it will support a mobile remote deposit capture product from San Diego-based Mitek Systems Inc., expects to have the service ready for financial-institution clients “some time” in the third quarter, says Chris Styga, executive vice president of the financial-service solutions group for the Salt Lake City, Utah-based vendor of banking software and unit of Zions Bancorp. Styga says projections of bank adoption are difficult to make this early on. “We expect some banks will deploy it, but we don't have a good feel for how many,” he says. The deal represents something of a coup for Mitek, which has already struck similar integration agreements with Fiserv Inc., NCR Corp., and ClairMail Inc., a mobile-banking processor. NetDeposit is a major provider of remote deposit capture services. Its NetCapture remote deposit capture gateway, which the Mitek service will leverage, is now used by between 55 and 60 institutions, Styga says. While remote capture for businesses using check scanners is well-established, Styga says NetDeposit has not yet worked out pricing for mobile capture. The service is aimed at a different customer base, including consumers, that has not yet been targeted for remote capture and that some banks regard as higher-risk users for a service that once depended on trusted bank tellers. Still, mobile capture has been gaining momentum among both banks and processors as smart phones gain popularity with both consumers and small businesses. Though the service is still considered somewhat experimental, recent studies have shown surprisingly strong consumer awareness of it, while institutions with early products, like USAA, have had success with an iPhone-based version. “There's been a lot of activity and communication in the industry [about mobile remote capture],” says Styga. “We're not sure any bank knows how large usage will be, and there are still concerns about who to deploy it to, but we as a software vendor wanted to be sure we were positioned” to offer the product. With mobile remote capture, consumers, mobile merchants, and small-business owners can snap pictures of the front and back of a check, using the camera in their handsets. Special software in the mobile phone makes corrections to the images and sends them over the mobile network to the user's bank, which process them through Check 21 rules. James DeBello, president and chief executive of Mitek, says the rapid spread of smart phones among both small businesses and consumers has given mobile capture a lift. “I see the vision being a reality in quick time,” he says. “The game changer has been the [Apple] iPhone.” Meanwhile, Brookfield, Wis.-based Fiserv is well along in developing a remote-capture service for potentially 1,100-plus financial-institution clients. The company last summer agreed to adopt Mitek's product (Digital Transactions News, July 30, 2009). A number of Fiserv clients large and small are testing the technology, according to Teri Carstensen, president of Fiserv's payments solutions unit. Carstensen expects some financial institutions to announce soon that they are rolling out the service. Banks and credit unions are considering mobile capture “as a way to compete,” she says. “The geography doesn't matter any more.” Technology, she adds, is less of an issue for financial institutions than are marketing and risk-control measures to determine which customers should get the service. Fiserv will offer remote capture to clients on a licensed software basis, as an application service provider (ASP), or on a hybrid model, Carstensen says. NetDeposit's Styga says bank clients may find it difficult to collect fees for the service from consumers, but that business users will see enough value in it to pay for it. “For businesses there's definitely a model [for fees],” he argues.
