Strengthen Your Member Services Strategy by Modernizing These Back-End Deposit Solution Gaps
Originally published on Finopotamus Payments Industry Leaders Forum, our CEO, Dede Wakefield, looks at 5 ways to achieve reduced costs through payments modernization.
Bank executives confirmed in a July 2023 survey that reducing processing costs through payments modernization was a top priority. With remote and digital banking channels often in the spotlight, it may come as a surprise that brick and mortar branches with in-person deposit solutions are still a focus. Some of the largest US-based institutions, in fact, are expanding their physical footprints to address a specific clientele of account holders, including small businesses. Despite tech-savvy users and remote conveniences, most account holders will visit a branch for specific transactions or financial advice throughout the year.
As technology evolves, so do account holder expectations, proving an omni-channel banking experience that combines remote and in-branch services is a necessity to meet changing market demands. Although your external look may appear refreshed as a result of branch transformation efforts, is your back-end deposits infrastructure keeping up, or is it the same that you’ve been running since Check 21 took effect?
To achieve reduced costs through payments modernization, it’s key to look at these five areas to improve your ROI, total cost of ownership, and ensure you’re poised to address the changing face of the deposits.
1. Managing multiple vendors and multiple line of business deposit solutions:
Maintaining multiple applications across each deposit channel may require specialized teams and resources. In parallel, maintaining independent relationships with various solution providers can be time consuming and costly. By considering a platform and provider consolidation, you may be able to save significant IT resources, and gain faster access to business intelligence through streamlined workflows and centralized databases – not to mention deploying new features, updates, and products more quickly.
2. Batch processing and exchanging files between systems:
Batches are typically processed late in the day but if an error is found, processing delays may impact downstream processes. In addition, deposit visibility may be lost, resulting in duplicate deposits across different channels due to delayed posting. More modern platforms allow for transaction-centric processes with real-time image and data validation, eliminating the need for batches, file exchanges between systems, and enabling real-time posting.
3. Growing fraud attacks and exposure:
Check fraud is becoming more difficult and expensive to resolve. Leveraging capabilities within your deposit solutions, like real-time image and data validation, your institution can implement an account holder scoring model based on an individual’s overall financial story, such as deposit and spending habits. Risk can be identified quicker, and users benefit from a more streamlined user journey across deposit channels.
4. Lack of scalability and flexibility:
Aging deposit solutions can be limited in their integration abilities and go-to-market models, hindering the ability to add new features, or new servers and workstations as check volumes fluctuate. API-driven, cloud-native platforms are designed to scale up or down as needed, and connect to third-party solutions with ease, giving financial institutions a more flexible environment to address internal goals and market needs.
5. Delays and service impacts related to testing and maintenance:
It’s not uncommon with existing solutions to take your entire platform offline to test or perform maintenance. Not only does this impact resources and costs, but account holders lose access to needed services during such times. Newer platforms leverage more modern architectures, allowing teams to focus their efforts in isolation – meaning testing, updating, and rolling out new features can be completed without impacting the entire platform.
Reduce Costs and Keep up with Market Needs with Unify
Unify is the only solution of its kind on the market that addresses both full- and self-service deposit channels with 1 platform and 1 API, resulting in faster item processing by taking a transaction-level approach rather than by batches. Fight fraud on an omni-channel level and blur the lines between Day 1 and Day 2 processing. With Unify, gain a tangible cost savings with reduced IT overhead regardless of whether you deploy enterprise-wide or by deposit channel.
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