Check It Out

Seafood Dynamics Inc. of Naples, which supplies fresh seafood to Southwest Florida's resorts and restaurants, has recently taken on another fresh concept. The company, commonly known as Incredible Fresh Seafood, is handling a major banking function in-house-saving time and money on different fronts.

Instead of going to the bank every day, employees are depositing customer checks several times a day without going anywhere. The checks are simply scanned into a device that electronically transmits the digital images to the bank for deposit. 

The Internet-based system known as "remote capture" is an increasingly popular tool that's making Seafood Dynamics and other companies more efficient. It has the potential to change business banking as we know it.

Rachel Gamble, a bookkeeper for the seafood company, says employees used to travel to the bank two or three times a day, and the trips gobbled up 15 minutes to an hour of time, depending upon traffic and lines at the bank.

Not only does the new system eliminate that lost time, but deposits seem to be hitting the business account more quickly than when they were made at the bank.

"Before, we had a lot of issues with deposits being lost, and taking a couple of days [to show up in the account]," she says. "Even though we had an account with millions of dollars in it, they'd still hold up checks on us."

Gamble adds that the system is easy to learn. "You don't have to have any computer knowledge whatsoever," she says.

In a survey recently released at the American Bankers Association's National Conference for Community Bankers, 58 percent of the respondents said they have adopted or plan to adopt the three-year-old technology by the end of next year. Fifty-eight percent also said that remote capture would be their top technology-spending priority this year.