Remote Remittance Capture Grows

By Mark Brousseau

While some lockbox providers have been disappointed by what they see as sluggish demand for their remote remittance capture solutions, Chris Rohner (chris.rohner@fnis.com), national remittance sales at Jacksonville, Florida-based Fidelity National Information Services (FIS), says the demand and volume has met her company’s expectations. FIS has about 20 financial institutions doing some form of remote remittance capture, Rohner told me.

The thing to keep in mind, Rohner notes, is that distributed capture isn’t for every lockbox client. “It works well when the customer has remote locations with walk-in payments, and they don’t want to be bothered completing the transaction,” Rohner said. “A good example of this is tax processing, where a municipality might have a lockbox, but also accepts walk in payments. At the end of the day, they want to receive one file and one set of reports. This is ideal for distributed capture.” In addition to municipalities, Rohner said FIS is seeing strong demand for its distributed capture solution from utilities and property management firms.

And she expects interest to pick up as FIS rolls out flatbed scanning capabilities for supplemental remittance documents. Today, the company only captures checks and coupons, with MICR and OCR read technology. It also offers a remote deposit capture solution to automate check deposits to a bank, and a consumer capture solution, as well. “We do a lot of due diligence before recommending a distributed capture solution,” Rohner told me.

How would you describe demand for remote remittance capture?

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