FSI’s banking products are in the news.
As an innovator of quality data processing, item processing, and online products for the banking industry, Financial Services, Inc. often finds itself in the news. That’s to be expected; when you stand out, the spotlight generally falls on you. If you’d like to see what the company has been up to, or how some of our products have captured the imaginations of our clients and the press, just click on a headline…
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FSI AND IMAGE EXCHANGE HELP CITY AND SUBURBAN SAVE BIG |
| GLEN ROCK, N.J., January 3, 2006 -- In June 2005, City and Suburban Bank became the first bank supported by FSI to present transit items to the Federal Reserve as images instead of paper. City and Suburban is a community bank presenting a mixed cash letter to the Federal Reserve. The bank continued to transport its checks to FSI’s Operations Center, where the items were scanned and then transmitted. When the bank made the move, there was no certainty that image exchange alone, without the benefits of remote capture, would be financially advantageous in the environment at that time. According to the Fed’s fee schedules, if the Fed receives an image and can pass it to the paying bank as an image, the cost is lower than presenting the original check in paper form. However, if the image has to be re-converted to an IRD (image replacement document), then the costs are higher. We knew that, since the Federal Reserve had not yet started exchanging inclearing items, the per item costs would rise, at least initially, because the Fed would have to convert every image presented into an IRD. The offset to the higher processing cost would be the increased availability. The question was, would the offset be sufficient? In September, after two full months of processing, an analysis was done comparing the costs of clearing checks as paper in the months leading up to the change to the costs of clearing images. Kevin Courtney, Item Processing Division Director at FSI, presented the results at the New Jersey Bankers conference in October. Processing costs did rise, by 4.4%. But availability increased from 91% to a whopping 99.91%. The effect on cost was a savings of 30.6%. Netting out the increased operational expense, the bank lowered its cost to clear items through the Federal Reserve by 26.2%. ABOUT FINANCIAL SERVICES, INC. |
