As a TAWPI Member you gain full access to our listserve; a community of practitioners and providers bouncing ideas and working on ways to improve their work process in the check and document automation industry. This listserve question came in which generated some interest and may be something your operation is struggling with as well:
Question: "We are a Utilities Company who is struggling with echecks. We currently receive hundreds of paper "echecks" from our customers. These checks I am referring to are ones where the banks offer bill payment services. It works great for our customers, however on the receiving end of the echeck, it is very time consuming and allows much room for human error, as these payments are posted to the customers accounts without a remittance stub and not through our automated system, but through a customer service representative's cash drawer. We are looking to change that. What is the best way to go about capturing all or most of these echecks and sending us some kind of posting file?
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Answer (given by an end-user Utility Co.) : It depends on where these are coming from. If they are from one "consolidator" (someone who issues the checks from a variety of banks), it is best to work with the operations department of that consolidator to receive a electronic file.
We had numerous checks that we used to receive in this manner, but over time they gradually become consolidated through other means. The bank may have become consolidated under Checkfee or Paymode for example. It is sometimes difficult and tedious to create a electronic file, but in the long run it also helps the customer.
We had numerous checks that we used to receive in this manner, but over time they gradually become consolidated through other means. The bank may have become consolidated under Checkfee or Paymode for example. It is sometimes difficult and tedious to create a electronic file, but in the long run it also helps the customer.
Answer (given by a TelCo end-user) "I work for a telecommunications company in Canada and we receive electronic payment files from the banks for all our APA payments except nonscannable. The payment stub is sent from the processing sites for the FI's (here some of the processing sites process for more then one financial institution) to out lead banks processing site. We receive a file daily of the scannable stubs and the non scannable stubs are sent to our mail processing site for processing. As we move to truncation (equivalent to your Check 21) the paper stubs of course are eliminated and we're just receive the file that has been centralized through our lead bank. Our company eliminated the processing of APA payments without a stub a few years ago. As we currently have more then one billing system that we process payments for the FI's have the scanline definition for each of them and have a different electronic payment file layout for most of them to they can be transmitted to us. All our payment files including APAs and telephone/internet banking payments are send to our Payment Gateway. The Payment Gateway is part of our centralized process and at the end of the day transmits payments files from all sources to each of the billing systems. The comment below about setting up the electronic file and testing etc being long and tedious is true but we found it well worth it. It helped make the truncation process seamless to us and our customer. Also we are in the process of consolidating our billing systems and are able to do this with little or no impact to the customers as we move them from one billing system to another and in some cases change their account information."
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Answer: (given by Insurance end-user) "Our company has arranged for a service from Chase bank that Chase calls "ACH Receiver Services."For their "ACH Receiver Services" product, Chase has arrangements with the large companies (e.g., CheckFree, Metavante, MasterCard RPPS) that are the back end service provider for many bank bill payment services.We provided information to Chase (such as our remittance processing addresses and account number formats). We worked through Chase to set up the arrangements with bill payment providers CheckFree, Metavante and MasterCard RPPS. At start-up, we exchanged some files with the bill payment providers to convert existing mutual customers to the electronic payment feed process.When new customers enter us as a "payee" at their bank and provide our remittance address and account number, the bill payment provider sends the payments to Chase electronically and Chase sends the payments to us electronically (as ACH transactions).We now receive over 30,000 payments a month that used to come to us as "check only" transactions through ACH Receiver Services.We chose the Chase product rather than making arrangements with each bill payment provider to avoid the challenge of negotiating trading partner agreements to start the program and managing multiple inbound transmission from each bill payment provider."
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Answer: (given by an end-user Service Bureau) "We have worked with the vendors like checkfree, online resources, metavante, cass etc...to have them send those payments to us in an electronic file, we then pull in the electronic file with our mail payment file and send to client for posting to their receivable system. This works very well for us, and reduces the human error factor. "
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Let us hear from you.....What are your recommendations or struggles?
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