What a difference five years make. Five years ago this month we launched Cachet Financial Solutions. We had one overriding objective: to develop and market tools that financial institutions could leverage in order to deliver and support remote deposit capture services for their business and retail customers. RDC was a relatively new idea at the time, made possible by the Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act (Check 21 Act for short), and it was meeting with mixed reviews. While customers appreciated the time and money savings made possible by RDC, many banks and credit unions were struggling with the need to develop affordable models for delivering RDC products and services. RDC Select™ was the first product Cachet introduced in response to this need, and we’ve been on a roll ever since.
Cachet’s software-as-a-service solutions leverage state of the art technologies for RDC and other remote capture applications. Applications like Select Mobile™ Deposit. More than 33 million Americans used their mobile devices to capture and deposit checks last year, and that number is expected to approach 50 million by the end of this year.
The market for reloadable prepaid debit cards is exploding as well. Cachet was fast to respond with Select Mobile™ Prepaid, the first check to card loading solution tailored to the prepaid industry. At last count, an estimated 13% of adult Americans were using reloadable prepaid cards on a regular basis; among Millennials 45% were using these cards. Mobile RDC is a natural fit with prepaid debit, and creates much-needed new revenue opportunities for banks and credit unions, such as deposit-availability pricing.
Mobile deposit is also turning out to be a hit with business clients as well, especially those with mobile workforces. We enhanced Cachet’s Select Business™ merchant capture solution last fall to meet the growing need for multi-channel merchant capture that enables seamless integration across desktop and mobile platforms. Our omni-channel solution now makes it easier for our clients’ merchants to manage business in the field—and even capture multiple checks in a single mobile deposit—anywhere, any time.
On the down side, mobile deposit does introduce the potential for new risks to banking. Fortunately, Cachet enables our clients to respond with advanced tools for identifying suspect deposits before they become losses. At organizations using Cachet’s CheckRisk Pro™ and CheckReview™ fraudulent deposits can be spotted before funds ever get credited to an account or loaded onto a prepaid card.
But Cachet solutions are not just about capturing checks. In 2014, for example, we launched Select Mobile™ Money—the first prepaid mobile money management platform for the prepaid industry. Now cardholders can keep, use and manage their cards with a variety of convenient financial services—from loading funds and paying bills to sending money to others and paying wireless fees— all through our award-winning Select Mobile™ Money app.
Cachet, capped off 2014 with our December introduction of Select Mobile™ Account Opening. The account application process can make or break a mobile banking program. Forms completion is time consuming and error prone. Mobile Photo Account Opening eliminates potential errors and speeds the process, improving app completion rates for our clients. An applicant with a smart phone simply snaps a photo of their official ID (such as a drivers’ license) and the app takes over from there.
It’s shaping up to be another year of innovation for Cachet. Just last month we announced integration of our Select Mobile Money prepaid platform with Apple Pay™ for point of sale transactions. An iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus user with a Select Mobile Money app can now click the Apple Pay icon within the app to select their prepaid card and complete a purchase. The app automatically presents details of the transaction along with an updated account balance. This complete integration with iOS and Apple Pay is just the latest reason why Select Mobile Money has become the gold standard for mobile financial services.
As someone who is old enough to have used first-generation PCs, I can’t help but be amazed by the miniaturization process: the computing power that once had to be contained in a bulky piece of desktop equipment is just a fraction of the computing power contained in an iPhone or Android device today. Now a similar miniaturization process is happening with RDC. In just five years we’ve evolved from RDC being a product that required bulky desktop scanning equipment to one that can be accomplished with the cameras that come standard on smartphones.
Remote capture has captured the attention of financial services firms and their customers. Now the real fun starts: using this momentum and the underlying technologies and services to create new models that support the evolution of financial services in the 21st century. I am truly excited by the possibilities the next five years will open up to Cachet and to our clients. Stay tuned!
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