GlobalVision Systems Solutions – Image Manager ™
Financial institutions such as banks, credit unions, stockbrokers, etc. need to deal with a huge amount of documents bearing customer signatures such as checks, loan notes, loan applications, loan agreements, account applications, wire transfer applications, letters of credit, etc. As required by law, financial institutions must store many years of documents and checks. Consequently, financial institutions need to use a large and secured storage space to keep them. When they need these documents or checks, somebody in the company must search through many boxes and cabinets.
In today’s business world, checks are the primary means for business payments. As a result, when any customer of a financial institution is involved with a lawsuit, a financial institution often receives a subpoena notice requesting it to produce copies for all the documents and checks related to that specific customer. Somebody in the financial institution must put aside his/her daily work, and spend hours or days to search for and copy the requested documents and checks. This kind of business interruption often turns out to be a frustrating and expensive process to the company. That is why financial institutions desire to use image processing for internal documentation control.
Image Manager™ (US patent pending) provides financial institutions with an economical and flexible solution to handle check images and document images. With Image Manager™, a user can always access the images of the desired documents and checks in a matter of seconds. The subpoena notice can be handled in a matter of minutes without causing any business interruption. As a result of using Image Manager™, a company can boost morale, save cost, and greatly improve its productivity and profitability.
Description
Most financial institutions use outside service providers to handle their item processing. In addition to clearing the checks and providing accounting records to the financial institutions, these service providers often provide check-imaging services, which scan all the checks into images and store them in a storage center for the financial institutions. Whenever a user needs any of these check images, he/she can obtain the image through a communication link (often a dial-up modem connection) to the storage center. Naturally, these service providers must charge users some fees for access to these images in order to recover their own operating costs and earn some profits for themselves. In addition, the communication link is not free. Telephone companies charge the usage of a dial-up connection based on distance and time. For these reasons, financial institutions often end up paying a relatively expensive fee to access each check image.
To avoid legal liability in case of disasters happening to the image storage center, these item processing service providers usually send CDs, which store the scanned check images, to financial institutions on a daily basis. Searching for check images through these CDs one by one is a painful process because thousands of CDs are available to a financial institution. When a financial institution receives a subpoena notice, somebody still needs to go through thousands of CDs to search for and duplicate the check images, though it is an easier job than searching through boxes and cabinets for the paper records. As a result, financial institutions still depend on the check image storage center to search for check images, though all these images are available inside the institutions through CDs. It often turns out that a financial institution needs to pay a lot more than it planned for the check image processing service.
Check image processing only resolves half of the documentation control problem inside a company. Since signatures are still the primary means for document authentication, financial institutions have the need to keep the images of all documents that have customers’ signatures. These documents, though with a quantity much less than that of checks, are often much more complicated to manage than checks. It is a common human mistake for some of these documents to be misplaced in the wrong file categories. Employees often spend many extra hours or days searching for one missing document.
Image Manager™ is designed to manage all the images used in a financial institution. All the check images stored on the CDs are moved into a huge storage disk on a daily basis. All the documents are scanned into the storage disk during its creation. As a result, Image Manager™ has all the check images and document images under its control. When a user has the desire to access the check images or document images, he/she can use the account number, date, check number, document number, categories, etc. to quickly locate the desired check images or document images and display them on the computer screen for review. He/she can print these images or copy them onto new CDs to satisfy the subpoena need or the customer inquiry.
Image Manager™ adopts the advanced browser-based technology to facilitate user access. A user can access Image Manager™ through either the Internet or the Intranet with excellent response time. There is little need for user training since most computer users are familiar with the Internet browser today. There is little need for technical support because no special software is required to install into the user’s computer. Since only the standard Internet browser is used, Image Manager™ is compatible with Unix, Windows, and Linux. It uses the ”thin client” system architecture, which means that a user computer with very small memory and no hard drive can still access Image Manager™ with ease.
Conclusion
Image Manager™ is the most advanced image processing system available today. It stores and manages all the images needed by financial institutions through a universal browser-based platform. With Image Manager™, financial institutions can save a tremendous amount of time and money, simplify technical support, boost morale and efficiency, and greatly improve the profitability of the entire organization.