US-based Viewpointe, a bank-owned provider of cheque imaging services, has signed a five-year, $174 million deal with IBM for the development of a new national cheque image archive.
Viewpointe says the new plaform will enable banks to store and access billions of images and payment data for the purposes of payment processing, customer service and information delivery.
The deal calls for IBM - which is also a minority owner in Viewpointe - to build a payments system will replace Viewpointe's current national image archive, which is the largest in the US. The current archive contains nearly 80 billion cheque images and is growing at the rate of about two billion images per month. The system is accessed by banks more than three million times a day.
Viewpointe says the new platform will be designed for 24X7 high availability and will be capable of serving 3500 images every second, considerably more than its current archive which typically processes less than 100 cheque images per second.
Lou Buglioli, Viewpointe CEO, says: "We worked with our customers and IBM to create a next-generation payments platform that maps to the future technical and business needs of the financial services industry related to payment processing and information delivery."
In a separate announcement, Viewpointe says all of its owner banks - Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, SunTrust, US Bancorp and Wells Fargo - are now actively in production with its Check 21 products, ImageShare and Pointe2Pointe.