Front Porch Digital Further Expands Check Image Archiving And Migration Capabilities
New Capabilities Enhance Company's Position as an Industry Leader In Check Image Archive Migration
MOUNT LAUREL, N.J., Jan. 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Front Porch Digital Inc., (OTC Bulletin Board: FPDI - news), a developer of software and services that enable the conversion and migration of text, images, and video to digital formats, today announced new capabilities and support for their comprehensive offering of check image archiving and migration services.
Americans alone still write about 68 billion checks a year, and research at Deluxe Corporation, a leading check supplier, suggests check usage may continue to rise each year by about 0.5% to 1%. As a result, check image archive technology has emerged as a tool for realizing new efficiencies and cost savings. This technology allows financial institutions to create and store digitized images of paper checks and other payments documents. Since the storage, retrieval and movement of digitized images is considerably less expensive and labor-intensive than that of paper, check image archive technology promises a potentially wide range of benefits for financial services institutions and their clients.
Several financial institutions, including Bank of America, Citicorp, the Federal Reserve Bank, and Wachovia/First Union have implemented image archives for check statements and other important financial documents. Also, with the new imaging technology, archive service providers have created services to facilitate the banking industry's conversion to check imaging. For example, Bank of America planned to complete the installation of imaging technology in all 22 or their check processing centers in 2001 so that digital images will be available to Bank of America customers in all banking centers nationwide and through online banking at the Bank of America website. Bank of America processes and clears more than 40 million checks and check-related items such as deposit tickets each day. These items will be captured by digital cameras and stored at Viewpointe Archive Services where they can be accessed if requested. Viewpointe, established by Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., and IBM in November 2000, facilitates the exchange of check images among banks, reduces industry check processing costs and lays the foundation for consumers to retrieve digitized check images from the Web. It is expected that industry check processing costs will be reduced by as much as 30 percent when the archiving service is fully implemented.
Front Porch Digital has developed a software-based architecture that performs the offline migration of checks archived by most legacy imaging systems to newer check archive systems. All image migration services provided by Front Porch Digital are performed offline using Front Porch Digital's proprietary technology. This technology is the result of years of development in the area of legacy data archive systems conversion. The Company's offline conversion services are unique in that they result in significant benefits to the customer by eliminating travel expenses, workflow disruptions, and system uptime interruptions. This offline approach is designed specifically to eliminate the hard to identify, hidden costs to the client when performing large-scale online data migrations and conversions, and enables financial institutions and service providers to maximize the benefits from using state-of-the-art image archiving systems by substantially reducing the cycle time of these complex migrations.
``Front Porch Digital has extracted, converted, and migrated billions of check images during 2001 alone,'' said Dr. Giancarlo Gaggero, senior vice president of media technologies for Front Porch Digital. ``Leveraging this wealth of technical expertise and operational experience, the Company has integrated new innovative capabilities and platform support into their professional services offering that enable financial institutions and service providers to aggressively, proactively take advantage of new systems and technologies that reduce operating expenses, mitigate risk, and provide new opportunities to offer value-add services to their customers.''
Front Porch Digital's check image archiving and migration services now offer new, industry-leading capabilities and platform support that includes:
Expanded check archive and management applications support. Front Porch Digital's check image archive and migration services support the ability to convert data interchangeably to and from a large number of archival systems and applications including BancTec, Check Solutions, CheckVision, DSI, Fileserv, IBM OnDemand Content Manager, and ImageSoft within both mainframe and open systems environments.
Enhanced storage media support. Front Porch Digital's scalable check migration platform can extract data from production optical platters, CD-ROM, and magnetic tapes, or from backup media, thus meeting different customer's requirements and ensuring maximum efficiency of the conversion process. All popular tape and optical media technologies are supported |
