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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Smaller Banks Compete With Automated Services

In the not-so-distant past, a regular part of the day for most small business owners was a run to the bank to make the daily deposit. Even before jumping in the car, checks had to be copied, information written by hand on deposit slips and totals calculated on a 10-key. That’s all becoming a thing of the past with a new process called remote-item capture. Using a special scanning device, one runs each check through the machine. An exact image is captured and transmitted immediately to a central processing location and within minutes, the money has registered as a deposit in the business’s account. It’s a high-tech solution that has given small banks the ability to compete with the largest of institutions. One of the companies helping level the playing field is Fiserv Inc., a Fortune 500 company offering a host of technologies. In this region, many smaller institutions turn to Fiserv’s Chatsworth location which houses the ITI-Outsourcing division. “We help give community banks the tools so they can compete against the major banks without investing in a huge infrastructure,” said Sam Langham, president of the western region for ITI-Outsourcing. One of their customers is Western Commercial Bank in Woodland Hills. “For me to buy a system like ITI and put it in-house, I would have to have programmers; I would have to have people clearing checks and doing all this stuff,” said Tommy Woo, WCB’s chief financial officer. “That’s not cost-effective for me, so I outsource to a data center like ITI.” In addition to the previously mentioned remote capture, banks can have access to any number of tools, or modules, like the automated process that makes filing the myriad of documentation required to comply with the Federal Reserve’s Bank Secrecy Act almost effortless. “Our tool automates that whole process so they can aggregate information effectively and then electronically be able to file that information with the Federal Reserve,” said Langham. As you probably know, banks are required to report when any one customer deposits more than $10,000 in one day. But what if a customer deposits $4,000 in one branch and then $6,000 in another branch? Rather than having someone at the end of the day review every transaction, software in the ITI branch identifies the multiple transactions, aggregates them and transmits the information automatically. Roughly 126 employees work out of the Chatsworth center. Most are customer-service focused, answering questions from 131 banks throughout the western region on how to install new products or services, fix glitches, or create reports so banks can better use the information that is available. The center fields approximately 425 calls a day, said Langham. “We’re kind of like a one-stop shopping for them,” said Langham, “So they’ll get products like ATM processing and item processing from other divisions of Fiserv but most of their service from our regional office.”

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