Viewpointe’s Image on Demand System Goes Live with First Bank Duo

Viewpointe Archive Services LLC became the latest image-exchange venture to go live today when First Horizon and SunTrust Banks became the first banks to clear checks through the service. Earlier this fall, the Small Value Payments Co., New York, began moving check images for client banks, and Endpoint Exchange Inc., Oklahoma City, Okla., a unit of Milwaukee-based Metavante Corp., was the first national image exchange to become operational. The first check clearings through Viewpointe's Image Share service comes more than a month after the Check Clearing Act for the 21st Century (Check 21) Act became law. Check 21 encourages image exchange as a means of truncating paper checks and turning them into electronic transactions by conferring legal status on so-called substitute checks, which are printouts of checks. By moving checks as digital files, banks expect to cut clearing time as well as costs related to check handling and fraud. Viewpointe had expected this spring to start Image Share in September (Digital Transactions News, May 21). Formed in 2001 and claiming some of the nation's largest banks as clients, including Bank of America, HSBC Bank USA, J.P Morgan Bank Chase & Co., and US Bancorp, in addition to SunTrust and First Horizon, Viewpointe operates a massive archive of check images. It is adding new images at a rate of 1.5 billion each month. Collectively, the 10 banks in Viewpointe are capable of delivering between 22 billion and 23 billion checks annually, or about half of all checks written in the U.S. Unlike the other image exchanges, Viewpointe operates on a model known as “image on demand,” which serves up images out of the archive as needed by banks rather than moving digital image files through a network. The model claims to cut storage and telecom costs, reducing by half the costs of image-exchange networks.