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Just as financial institutions were digesting the idea of letting consumers deposit checks by snapping images of them with their handsets, along comes PayPal Inc. with the first such application offered by a non-bank—and one that has so far proven to be quite popular.
San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal announced late last week it had taken in $100,000 in deposits on the application in the first 36 hours after it became available Oct. 5. The processor will not reveal how many items that represents, but the sudden surge clearly caught it off guard. “We knew this would be popular, but we were surprised how many checks must have been lying around peoples’ houses,” says a PayPal spokesman.
As of late Tuesday afternoon, the new version 2.7 of PayPal’s mobile app, which incorporates the check-capture feature, had racked up an overall average rating of 3.5 stars out of a possible 5 on Apple Inc.’s app store. The rating is “high” compared to that garnered by previous versions of the app, according to the spokesman.
PayPal’s app works on the iPhone and other devices running Apple’s operating system. Its check-capture feature, which allows U.S. users to deposit checks into their PayPal accounts, relies on technology supplied by Bankserv Inc. Bankserv late this summer acquired NetDeposit LLC, a vendor of technology for Check 21 and automated clearing house transactions (Digital Transactions News, Aug. 31). NetDepost early this year developed a consumer-capture service using software from Mitek Systems, a San Diego company whose platform has been adopted by a wide array of processors and financial institutions, wholly or in part (Digital Transactions News, March 4). So far, though, few banks have rolled out a mobile check-capture service, with USAA Federal Savings Bank and JPMorgan Chase & Co. standing out as prominent exceptions. And, until PayPal, no non-bank had introduced such a feature.
Though the response to PayPal’s check-capture feature has been stronger than expected, the service itself has been in the works for several months. Indeed, news that the company was working on such an application first emerged in mid-August. “We’ve been looking at this option for a while,” says the spokesman. “This is part of PayPal’s vision to create a digital wallet, so consumers have a go-to payment device, which we hope will be PayPal online and, increasingly, offline.” PayPal also wanted to relieve its users of a “pain point,” that of having to make a trip to the bank or an ATM to deposit a check, the spokesman says.
One observer who isn’t surprised by the application’s early success is John Leekley, chief executive and founder of Alpharetta, Ga.-based RemoteDepositCapture.com, an online source of news and information. “There’s tremendous demand for consumers and mobile [check capture],” he says. “PayPal’s offering fits right into that.” He figures the service will be especially popular with small-business owners who own PayPal accounts. “Checks are going to be a primary payment mechanism for quite a while, especially in the business environment,” he notes.
Holding back mobile capture, despite that latent demand, is fear of risk. To help control the potential for fraud, PayPal restricts users to no more than $3,000 in check deposits per month and no more than $1,000 per check. It also caps deposits at 30 checks per month. Users are told to wait 15 days and then dispose of the original items.
