I’ve officially seen the full spectrum of Remote Deposit Capture now.
We’ve been to banks that will sell scanners and merchant capture solutions to mom and pop shops and give their dog a login account through cash management (Don’t worry he’s a guard dog, so he understands security). I’ve also talked to CEO’s who just won’t allow their customers to do their encoding for them, so they won’t even consider a merchant capture product. Maybe he should get a more reliable customer base.

Now, I’m going to surprise you here because I (the security minded consultant) lean towards the first banker who will sell merchant capture to anyone. Why? Because out of all the banks that we have been to and all the different products we’ve seen used, we’ve seen absolutely ZERO losses. Kudos to the vendors rolling out a really great product integrated with Check 21 and the bank’s first right to those imaged checks.
Yeah, we’ve seen some duplicated checks and numerous headaches for operations staff, but these are definitely worth it for getting some more hooks into those commercial customers.

You can also further reduce your exposure by placing deposit limits on these accounts, just like you do with ACH limits. There are also some good reports off merchant capture products and will even tell you which checks were scanned twice.
So, for you bankers that are on the fence about merchant capture, hop off into the 21st century and give your customers what they really want with very low risk potential. Go ahead and sell it to your ‘iffy’ customers too, just put some additional controls around them.