Best Practices in Remote Deposit Capture

Celent approached leading RDC vendors, seeking to understand the disparity between RDC adoption and deployment by examining deployers from financial institutions of all shapes and sizes. The results showed that highly effective deployers shared a number of habits.

"Collectively, the first three habits relate to how institutions embrace RDC and how they deal with it internally. The last four have to do with how deployers take to the market. Said another way, the last four habits are manifestations of the first three and form the deployer’s 'public face,'" says Bob Meara, senior analyst and author of the report. "More than any other factor, the first habit separates highly effective deployers from the rest."

The report discusses the seven habits in detail along with the sales, marketing and operational best practices that accompany them. The seven habits are:

1. A robust vision for the RDC opportunity
2. Senior management sponsorship and visibility
3. A realistic risk assessment
4. Significant investment in sales and marketing with clear objectives
5. Involvement of the retail bank at the branch level
6. Specific and incremental sales incentives
7. A sense of urgency

These seven habits define an outlook that has consistently led to successful RDC deployments across financial institutions of all sizes. Conspicuously absent from this list, however, is any mention of highly differentiated or best-in-class products. This is to be expected in a market crossing the chasm. First mover advantage has been huge among the current cadre of RDC-deploying institutions. However, as competition for individual clients increases over time, competitive product and service attributes will become increasingly important.

Also absent from the list is any mention of operational excellence among highly effective deployers. This is a reasonable outcome based on RDC’s adolescence as a product. Like product differentiation, operational best practices will increasingly avail competitive advantage for deployers as RDC matures.