NEW YORK, Nov. 3 -- In order to ease the cost of the banking industry's conversion to check imaging, Bank of America, The Chase Manhattan Bank and IBM have formed a new check image archive company called Viewpointe Archive Services. By creating a common digital archive for check images, Viewpointe will facilitate the exchange of check images among banks, reduce industry check processing costs by as much as 30 percent when fully implemented and lay the foundation for consumers to retrieve digitized check images from the Web.
In creating the archive, Viewpointe member banks will capture digital images of check and check-related items as they are processed and cleared, and then transmit these images to one of two archiving centers managed by IBM. The two founding banks clear more than 50 million checks a day or 12.5 billion checks a year.