Image consciousness whatever happened to imaging?

• Position: Marketing News - Brief Article

Remember imaging? It led the vanguard of the paperless office brigade a few years back, but it fell by the wayside when it couldn't keep up with expectations. Far from cutting the costs of paper-handling, it often cost so much to implement and produced so little tangible results that banks shoved image processing well down on their priority lists. Then the Internet came along, and banks transferred their attention to the promise of more immediate benefits.

Maybe things are changing. Carreker Corp., a major provider of imaging services, reports that some big banks are returning to the fold: Bank of America, Wachovia, Bank One, SunTrust, U.S. Bancorp, HSBC and others are looking into the prospects of imaging as a tool to solve difficult, recurring problems.

Bank of America, for instance, uses imaging technology to read the handwritten amounts on checks and compare those entries with the mechanical encoding. The system...