The Chase for Mobile Deposits

Author: Brandon Kunz, bkunz@profitstars.com

When $2 trillion+ JPMorgan Chase announced that it was offering mobile remote deposit capture, it received a flurry of attention from the press, from industry analysts, and directly from consumers and small business owners who have seen its QuickDeposit for Mobile commercials spread across prime time television and even the Super Bowl.

Chase was already well known for convenience with an extensive customer servicing infrastructure of over 5,100 branches and 10,000 ATMs.  So, why the significant and very public push into mobile remote deposit?  And why now, when most financial institutions are leery of making any aggressive move with remote deposit capture due to regulatory and compliance concerns?

In speaking about this topic at the ProfitStars Educational Conference this year in Chicago with a wide variety of ProfitStars’ clients including Chase, several of our other large financial institution clients, and a diverse group of smaller financial institutions it became clear that despite the fact that while many of us who have been around the industry for a long time thought mobile remote deposit fool’s gold just a few years ago the world around us has changed.

The core value proposition to the end user of remote deposit capture has always made sense, including: 

• Convenience
• Saving trips to the bank and the associated risk
• Accelerating clearing and enhancing cash flow (sometimes just a matter of eliminating “desk float”)
• Reducing return item risk
• Making it possible to maintain relationships with preferred financial institution providers regardless of relocation and business growth

What has changed is our ability to provide these benefits through a much more convenient and readily available channel than ever before.  We are almost a full year ahead of Javelin projections from April of last year in smart phone adoption.  Key market segments are particularly attracted to the mobile channel and have clearly stated their desire in word and action for convenience and time savings through meaningful mobile applications.  These factors together with the ability of the more reputable remote deposit solutions on the market today to effectively mitigate the risk of remote deposit transactions through proven security controls, user tracking, deposit limits and review procedures and enterprise level duplicate detection technologies all triangulate to change the question to not whether your financial institution will offer mobile remote deposit but when.

And the answer to the “when” question for most financial institutions at the PEC this year was within the next 12-24 months.  Chase’s recent marketing efforts have certainly made an impact on the expectations of consumers and small businesses around the country and competing banks need to react accordingly.

All banks, regardless of size, should be aggressively developing a mobile deposit strategy, and should be planning to implement it in the near future. The service will extend deposit gathering to consumers and small businesses at the lowest possible price, while increasing loyalty at the same time. Those that act quickly have much more to gain, and will be well positioned to capitalize on the future market.