NCR Canada is marketing a new brand of homegrown imaging technologies to financial services institutions, offering them improved service potential at the retail level and new data-mining capability for their direct marketing campaigns.

Developed by engineers and programmers at ncr’s Waterloo, Ont. research and production facility, ImageMark software operates on a Unix platform and allows banks to capture and warehouse an image of every piece of paper that comes across a teller’s desk: cheques, deposit slips, cash machine tapes – the works. Each image can then be accessed across the entire enterprise, making the image – rather than the paper original – the focus of each day’s balancing and reconciliation activities.

Given the estimated 1.6 billion paper items that Canadian banks process each year, that could mean significant savings in labor costs and processing time as fewer people are needed to process paper.

‘ImageMark provides [financial services companies] significant opportunities to make operational efficiencies, grow revenue through new fee-generating products and services, and bring the full value of imaging to consumers,’ says Rick Makos, vice-president of NCR Canada’s financial systems group.

Benefits aside, ncr faces a significant challenge in overcoming concerns about the growing ability of banks to collect and access personal information. ‘Smart’ functionality allows the software to read handwritten cheque entries such as dollar figures, which means it can read and tally up the day’s receipts in one fell swoop. But it can also read and track dates and payee information – an El Dorado for database managers or an Orwellian infringement of consumer privacy, depending on your point-of-view.

Mardi Witzel, director of marketing development, image and payment systems for NCR Canada says that new anti-fraud capability, along with the promise of expanded service options for banking customers should mitigate concerns about the accumulation of personal data.

‘There’s a trend toward more Internet and telephone access to banking services, and that’s because bank branches are really a very inefficient way to deliver service. ImageMark allows banks to diversify their delivery channels and provide better, faster service.’

In the case of a customer inquiry, for instance, an operator at a remote tele-banking centre could access an image of a cheque immediately (‘In six seconds, rather than six days,’ says Witzel). Just as likely, monthly account statements could take the form of a picture-record of each cashed cheque. Also, the images are stored in a Web-friendly (jpeg) image format, leaving the door open for some kind of Internet access to them. Down the road, customers could access them and other financial records as part of an expanded Web-banking package.

As well, the NCR 7780 transport unit that actually reads and sorts the documents for imaging also has anti-fraud functions to detect suspect documents that may have been altered or counterfeited, according to the company. That could put a real crimp in the multi-billion-dollar, worldwide cheque fraud racket.

ImageMark is being promoted with print ads in USA Today, while an integrated pr campaign is taking place across North America, including presentations to top corporate systems consultants and explanatory seminars for bank executives.

ImageMark is already up and running at 17 test locations in the u.s. and South Africa. Winston-Salem, n.c.-based Wachovia Bank is using ImageMark now at seven of its u.s. locations.