Heritage Bank goes remote

Heritage Bank, a locally operated bank in Atlanta's Southern Crescent, is offering 'remote deposit', a process that eliminates the need to physically go to a bank to make deposits of paper cheques, says Henry Daily Herald Online.

Remote deposit enables businesses to process and deposit cheques in one transaction. By using a small cheque scanner and Internet access, the cheques are scanned and the images saved.

Because of the initial expense of establishing remote deposit technology, the service has, until now, been used primarily by large, national banks and national or international businesses.

The African Bankmaster User Group has been challenged to provide personalised and cheaper ICT systems to African banks, says allAfrica.com.

Reuben Marambii, MD of the National Bank of Kenya, claimed the costs associated with the Bankmaster system are too high and suggested that in order to reduce costs, system developers should source labour from Africa.

Marambii noted that due to competition among banks in the country, most of them had resorted to "zero minimum balance" options in order to attract customers, with some banks serving up to a million clients.

Scotiabank is expanding its relationship with IBM in a new IT outsourcing deal that's expected to cost $480 million over the next six years, says The Canadian Press.

Under the arrangement announced Thursday, IBM will manage the Canadian bank's IT operations, including its data centres, branches and automatic banking machines.

The deal extends a contract signed in 2001, when IBM began to manage Scotiabank's IT operations, and will provide a new "international" framework that will adapt to the bank's needs as it expands abroad.