A major Canadian newspaper, first published over a 100 years ago, and is now one of the top newspapers in the county and the first to begin corporate remote cheque deposit in Canada with Creditron.
Situation
In 2004 the newspaper invested in the NCR iTran180 hardware to process large volumes of payments for Circulation, Subscription, Private Party Classified Advertising and Business display advertising. Over time the business requirements changed due to declining cheque volumes and the legacy hardware became expensive to maintain. The aging hardware led to increased downtime and scan line changes required expensive software maintenance from their vendor. The existing system was proving to be highly inefficient and very costly.
Options
The newspaper began exploring possible solutions to help decrease costs and improve its processing. The three options that were available included outsourcing, an in-house solution with smaller hardware and a hybrid option where exceptions would be processed in-house and the rest of the work would be outsourced. Prior to 2004, the newspaper had an outsourcing agreement and saved money by bringing the work in-house. Due to the modest volumes & staffing requirements outsourcing was eliminated as an option early on.
The hybrid option presented little benefit as the solution which would handle exceptions in-house could easily process the work to be outsourced. The approach that best fit the newspaper’s needs was to find an in-house solution which was efficient and one that would work with a smaller, more economical transport.
The newspaper met representatives from Creditron at the 2012 IFO Conference in Toronto and learned about their ItemAge Express solution along with the Canon CR190 transport. ItemAge Express provided many advantages that their current system didn’t have including full redundancy. The Canon transport would additionally provide a huge cost savings and would take up a much smaller footprint.
Challenges
Before implementing the Creditron solution the newspaper wanted to ensure that the investment would yield a sufficient payback. Creditron worked with the newspaper to perform multiple on-site demos and walk-throughs of their environment. The mutual understanding that developed from these meetings helped the newspaper to select Creditron as the vendor of choice.
CPA Rule A10 Amendment
Another challenge had to do with the fact that cheques in Canada needed to be encoded and the Canon transport did not encode. During the same time the Canadian Payments Association (CPA) enacted an amendment to Rule A10 which enabled the framework for the creation and use of Clearing Replacement Documents (CRDs) instead of the original paper cheque. As a result, Canadian businesses no longer had to encode cheques and physically transport them to a financial institution for deposit.
Solution
The newspaper recognized the benefits of the CPA amendment and took the opportunity to work with Creditron to eliminate the physical cheque deposit. Within a few months the newspaper became the first corporation in Canada to leverage Creditron technology to deposit cheques electronically. The newspaper replaced their existing system with Credtrion’s ItemAge Express solution along with the Canon CR190 transport. Since deployment the newspaper has experienced significant cost savings including an over $50,000 per year in hardware maintenance alone. The Creditron software reduces the sorting and keying of payments along with and providing an archive of images and data for payments from all of the newspaper’s departments. This allows staff to instantly retrieve images of processed transactions for inquiries.
The combination of Creditron’s technology and the CRD amendment allows the newspaper to process their remittance payments and generate their electronic bank deposit file in a ‘one-touch’ processing workflow. In addition to remote deposit, the Creditron solution eliminates the need for staff to manually pre-sort payments and provides automated reading and balancing of cheque and posting amounts reduces data entry.
Solution Benefits
- Open and handle documents once
- No more couriers
- Automate balanced transactions, key exceptions
- Research archive – improved customer service
