The death of checks seems to have been greatly exaggerated.
Mitek Systems is announcing a new product today, mobile check deposit for businesses. The product will work much like the consumer version, but has additional functionality, such as the ability to attach invoices or other supporting documents.
Checks may not be the hottest topic in payments conversations these days, but those little slips of paper are alive and well, and nowhere more so than in the business world. They’re handy for bookkeeping, and easy to drop in the mail. Business accountants are comfortable with them — however much they may annoy the tech-savvy consumer or FinTech enthusaist.
“Customers love the convenience of mobile deposit,” said Mitek’s vice president of product, Sarah Clark. “We want to bring that to business.”
Clark told Bank Innovation that 2,800 FIs have consumer mobile deposit, serving 33 million end users. Mitek expects that to increase 40% this year to 47 million.
Clark cited a Celent survey that said 50% of banks have solid plans to enhance business offerings in 2015. (100% said they would like to, but half had no solid plans to follow through on that.) “This product will address that market need,” she said.
Use cases for the product favor smaller businesses, or field operatives of larger businesses, Clark said. “Large businesses handling tons of checks — those are not the target for this product right now.”
One beta tester is a major wine distributor that gave its delivery drivers the power to collect payments using their mobile devices.
“72% of small businesses prefer checks to cards because of the interchange fees,” Clark said. “Mobile deposit turns their preferred payment method into a mobile payment.”
Mitek expects a steeper adoption curve for commercial deposit than for consumer, and Clark optimistically suggested half of banks offering consumer deposit will also offer commercial deposit by the end of 2015.
For now, checks are still snapped one at a time in the product, but down the road, multiple checks may be deposited simultaneously. This would likely increase the appeal for businesses seeing higher check volumes. It should be noted that many businesses (Bank Innovation included), even small businesses, already have remote deposit capabilities that allow for bulk RDC.
Any number of supporting documents can be attached to a check deposit, and depending on the bank’s downstream OCR processes, these invoices and other documents can enter the systems as structured data. Otherwise, they can be attached as images to be reconciled by humans. Mitek also provides services that help with these downstream processes, but most banks will likely start out simply and just add the capture service to start, Clark said.
“This is another example of consumer innovations crossing the line to commercial,” Clark said. “It’s a new word I just learned — consumerization.”