USAA Bank has teamed with Apple to offer an app that allows you to take a photo of your check with your iPhone and send it for automatic deposit.
USAA Bank has seven million customers and isn’t the largest or most well-known bank in the country, but now they’re surely poised to be the most innovative. The idea seems pretty simple when you think about it, but going from the back-end, the security requirements must be horrendous.
The application appeared (rather quietly) in May and it goes live this week, rolling out across the country over the week.
It works pretty simply: the customer takes a photo of the check (front and back) and then sends it to the USAA deposit address via any cellular connection the iPhone is capable of using. The bank will receive it, process it, and send an acknowledgment and you can then just shred the original paper check and be done.
USAA has been working on this as part of their overall mobile strategy for quite a while and has been especially focused on simplifying check deposits. The bank doesn’t have a lot of live branches, so being a leader in Web technology has been key for them. They were the first to introduce check scanning for deposit three years ago, in which customers scanned checks on any platform scanner and sent it in electronically for deposit.
For those of you who don’t have an iPhone, don’t worry. USAA is working on apps for other smart phone platforms to be released through the rest of the year.
The bank hasn’t released any numbers on their usages, but one of the bigger banks, Bank of America, has said that they estimate that at least 40% or more of their mobile customers are using an Apple product like the iPhone or iPod Touch.
This kind of new tech from USAA is the kind of thing that propels mobile banking and our more convenient, faster mobile lifestyles forward. In fact, it smacks of the kind of thing that will be considered commonplace in a few years. Just as mobile banking is considered common today.
Awesome. Watch this video demo to see how it works:
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