Businesses Save Time/Money Making Check Deposits Electronically

The daily trip to the bank to make deposits may be a thing of the past for Valley businesses thanks to Remote Deposits, a new check-clearing system from National Bank of Arizona that allows customers to make business check deposits electronically from their place of business.

Introduced in early 2005, Remote Deposits is a secure system that eliminates the physical transfer of checks, reduces the labor-intensive manual deposit preparation time and cost, greatly reduces the clearing time and provides for online image storage and research of all checks deposited.

“This is the hot product in business banking right now,” National Bank of Arizona Senior Vice President Deborah Bateman said. “Not only do our business clients no longer need to take their check deposits to a branch, those clients will also have access to their working capital much sooner with faster receipt of funds.”

Through the use of the Remote Deposits scanner and software, clients can deposit checks directly from their desktop. As checks are scanned, electronic images of those checks are uploaded to National Bank of Arizona via the Internet. National Bank then sends the images to a print site located close to a Federal Reserve. The check image is printed on secure paper, and then presented to the originating bank.

“Clients can consolidate regional or national deposits to a single account, substantially reducing deposit collections costs,” Bateman said. “There’s no need to get to the bank on time because deposits can be made 24 hours a day.”

In addition to the time and cost saved by eliminating the physical transportation of checks to the bank, businesses can access their working capital sooner. This is because Remote Deposits speeds up the receivables process by clearing checks as soon as the following business day. With accelerated check clearing, the risk of fraud is reduced as returned items are identified sooner.

More than 70 business clients currently use Remote Deposits. National Bank hopes to have 500 of the check-clearing systems in use by next year.

Remote Deposits is a product of the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act, or Check 21, recent legislation that requires all U.S. banks, including the Federal Reserve, to accept substitute checks made from digital copies of originals.