High-tech banking; Indiana banks test banking by personal computer and touch-tone phone.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve

For some Indiana bank customers, tastes of the future are here already. There are banks that allow customers with PCs the kind of account access formerly reserved for tellers. There are banks whose customers may transfer funds, issue stop-payment orders and pay bills using their telephones. Some Hoosier banking customers, instead of receiving an envelope stuffed with canceled checks every month, keep their desks neat with laser images of the checks they write, filed away in orderly fashion in three-ring binders.

Such technology-oriented services, the bankers say, can help the institutions run more smoothly and efficiently. Perhaps even more important, they can attract and retain customers in an age of decreasing customer loyalty.

Some of the latest innovations have been appearing in a place one might not expect: small-town Indiana. STAR Financial Group, based in Marion, this year unveiled "STARimage," a new look in bank statements that springs from advances in check-processing technology. It's so new that you can count on one hand the number of Indiana banks currently using the technology.

All STAR Financial Bank checking customers now receive with their monthly statements STARimage check pages, which are standard-size pages that each contain the laser-printed images of a dozen cleared checks. Printed below each check image is the date that check posted as well as verification of the check number and the amount paid, making it especially easy to verify the accuracy of the bank statement.

STAR is not alone among banks in its desire to stop mailing those stacks of canceled checks. Indeed, many banks offer lower-cost accounts for which checks aren't returned to the customers; if customers need copies of canceled checks, the bank can retrieve them from microfilm records. "But we felt that customers still want some form of information from the check itself," says Jim Marcuccilli, president of information-processing subsidiary STAR Financial Systems. "With imaging, we can still get customers the information they want."

STARimage is not a microfilm recording system, Marcuccilli emphasizes. It's significantly more advanced. Under the old system, checks would be sorted by employees, recorded on microfilm and then returned to customers with the monthly statements. Each check would be handled up to six times, says Greg Pence, STAR's director of marketing.

Now, when checks are presented to STAR for processing, they are loaded into a machine that sorts...