The FSTC describes itself as a consortium of leading North American-based financial institutions, technology vendors, independent research organizations, and government agencies, whose goal is to bring forward, test, prove, and validate the next generation of critical financial services technologies and how they can be applied industry wide.
The goals of the FSTC’s Image Quality and Usability Assurance Project were to produce a set of metrics against which check images could be judged and establish thresholds that identify unusable images.
These standards, many of which are already being adopted, will enable financial institutions for the first time, to accurately predict check image usability as the banking system moves toward full electronic processing of the 36 billion checks a year that the nation’s businesses and consumers produce.
Banks will therefore soon be able to improve the effectiveness of their manual review while reducing the number of images reviewed, speed up their review times, and reduce their risk and liability. This is a key development in the deployment of image exchange and the Check 21 Act.
The FSTC says accurately identifying problem images early in the check processing cycle can prevent poor quality images from entering the system, and help ensure efficient processing and high customer satisfaction levels.
