This is the first installment of a series of posts where we outline the journey we have been on since inventing Mobile Deposit® for the financial industry. We will share some of the insights we’ve gained and why they matter to the broader industry. This first post highlights the importance of scale as financial services rapidly move toward digital channels.
Since inception, Mitek’s Mobile Deposit has enabled consumers and businesses to deposit over 1.7 billion checks worth more than a trillion dollars. Even as you’re reading this sentence, customers of over 6,100 financial institutions are using our technology to deposit a check. But that’s not the real story.
The real story is that each check deposit is a story in itself
The real story is that each of these deposits is a story in itself. An adolescent depositing her first ever paycheck, a small business owner depositing a check from his truck, a harried parent depositing a check while waiting for swimming lessons to end – each of these are hugely important to the people involved and their chosen financial institution. And since no photo is perfect, each of these deposits involve subtle technical hurdles that must be overcome. Perhaps there was light streaming into the business owner’s truck when he took his photo, causing a significant shadow across half of the image. Perhaps the parent held her phone at an angle, causing the image to be skewed. Perhaps the adolescent was moving her phone when she took her picture.
Now multiply those technical hurdles and human stories by millions and you’ll gain an appreciation for one of the great advantages the biggest financial institutions and data processors in the U.S. have learned: Mitek’s Mobile Deposit is not built for the highly controlled world of scanners where every image is the same, but is instead created for real people living real lives and taking real pictures (sometimes really bad pictures). Doing a “pretty good” job in this environment is not good enough for financial institutions who have their brand riding on each and every transaction.
We could brag about how great our technology scales in the stress tests we’ve done for the biggest banks in the country. We could focus on how our industry-leading algorithms make tough technical challenges look easy. Or we could point to one of the hundreds of small technical insights we’ve made over the years that make our current release perform so well. But if that’s all we did we’d be missing the point, and so would you.
Each deposit tells a story. To make that a happy story, we have made sure our technology can process deposits for thousands of banks, millions of consumers, billions of deposits, and trillions of dollars – one deposit at a time. That’s what scale means to us.
Learn more about the reasons why Mitek’s Mobile Deposit is the gold standard for remote check deposit.
About Michael Diamond
General Manager, Payments Solutions. Mike leads the team that invented, patented, and now develops and markets the most exciting mobile product to hit banking: Mobile Check Deposit. Mitek’s payments team is committed to leveraging mobile capture in new ways to delight mobile users.
A former Military Intelligence Officer in the USAR and is a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, Mike has grown innovative technology companies such as Obopay, IBM, Alphablox, S1 and Edify.