Yeah, I'm still waiting for the bacon smiley to be added ;)

Soooo, I went to the ATM today to deposit a check for the first time in a long time. There’s a new way of doing it that’s pretty cool, and I don’t know how long it’s been around (but it seems brand new to me).

You simply shove a check in a slot, and the ATM scans it ... then tells you how much the check is for ... and gives you a receipt with an image of the check printed on it.

That’s pretty slick.





If I deposited checks, that is.

Yeah - I found a BofA machine near DL (on Katella just West of State College) that does that - I was tripping over that. It got the amount correct on two out of three checks (there were two hand-written checks and the handwriting on one was just outside the OCR's capability).

Since I have to deposit a check EVERY WEEK, I wish the machines that I regularly use were like that. I've even thought about stopping by the Katella one on the way to use that ATM, but it is just a wee bit to far out of my way.

I think it will again. this is too weird

I think it will again. this is too weird

the ATM thing is cool. I'll have to check that out (no pun intended)

It is spreading quickly through the industry but it is about 5-6 years old now (I beta tested some of the first ones Wells had back then). But don't think it is primarily about customer ease. The big selling point is that it drastically cuts down on certain types of fraud.

I would think it would also cut down on data entry errors (on the part of the user) which would help reduce costs for the bank.

Not really, the checks were always processed with an automated system (98% or so of all checks are processed without ever being seen by human eyes), the information on the deposit slip was only of limited significance.

It is, of course, an issue but just not a very big one. Empty envelope fraud and Check 21 are the primary drivers.

Empty envelope fraud - People would take advantage of the cash back feature of ATM deposits by depositing empty envelopes taking back the $100 and doing this for the 1-3 days before it is caught and the account closed (fraudulently opened accounts, of course). One successful instance of this ($100) is the same cost as about 1,300 data entry errors that fail out to the manual process (about $0.075 each).

Check 21 - Allows check images to be processed as if they were the source paper. If the ATM images the check it can be put into the processing pipeline immediately cutting down by a couple days the processing time to almost immediate (floating checks hoping to deposit before it clears is an increasingly bad idea). This saves banks a lot of money because such ATMs need only be maintained for money and mechanical issues rather than daily to retrieve deposits for processing. The expense here (hiring the armored trucks to do it is very expensive) again far outweighs the costs of user error.

I had a horrendously busy day at work today; 4 scheduled meetings and 2 unscheduled meetings. I got absolutely no regular work done (and of course, it kept piling up all day).

On top of it all, I slipped and fell on the linoleum floor in the Lunchroom. There was a puddle of water I didn't see. My manager and I had to fill out a heap of paperwork (even though I wasn't injured, we still had to do all the workers comp stuff).

You would think, in this day of advanced computing technology, that a phone company as big and well-capitalized as AT&T could forward a ****ing business phone line without taking 5 days to do it.

I believe I actually heard the word "typist" mentioned in the explanation of why it would take so long.