A bank manager knocks on your door and brings you a check that looks “funny.” You examine it and look for all the tell-tale signs — luckily, you catch this one right away. The check number doesn’t match the number in the magnetic ink.
At least you caught this one.
But we all know how many go unnoticed, contributing to a whopping 84% increase in check fraud in the USA last year. COVID-19 saw a massive rise in check washing, where people switch the names on legitimate checks and cash them fraudulently. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Today’s fraudsters have endless ways to cash fake cheques — and it’s your job to stop them.
Our take? You won’t get far analyzing them on a case-by-case basis. There are simply too many for your tellers to catch.
Luckily, check scanner software solutions for banks do some serious numbers catching fraudulent checks. We’ve rounded up our three favorites this year and compared all their features for you to assess.
Why Invest in Check Scanner Software for Banks?
Three reasons: speed, accuracy, and visual analysis.
Guess what check fraudsters have on their side? Time. Even a bank with 50 tellers can’t catch every piece of data that could flag a fraudulent check. You employ humans, not robots — and your staff can’t possibly examine, analyze, and assess a check’s risk for fraud.
Here’s the thing: they shouldn’t have to. Imagine saving daily hours that amount to weeks manually entering and analyzing data. Check scanner software for banks takes care of the collection within seconds. For example, one of ScanWriter’s case studies cites six weeks of time savings for an analyst who had to input 5,000 transactions into the system.
And if we go by one study’s human error rate for manual data entry (3.7%), you could bet 185 out of those 5,000 entries could have had mistakes.
On top of accuracy and speed, the best check scanner software for banks helps you visualize check fraud data. Instead of relying only on long-winded Excel sheets, you can use check scanner software to communicate the “big picture.”
ScanWriter representative Michelle Dulog outlines the platform’s visualization capabilities:
“What’s special about our integration with PowerBI is that it double-checks the data for me. But we have a full library of visualization models…so something like “all transactions” is great for an overview, STAR analysis is useful for mixed accounts.”
Best Check Scanner Software for Banks
ScanWriter
ScanWriter is a check scanning software that saves financial institutions about 90% of labor hours in data capture and analysis — a transparent data point demonstrating the company’s dedication to improving its product. From repeated payer-payee relationships to human-generated amounts, ScanWriter helps clients catch every possible instance of check fraud through its extensive check image analysis.
The company behind ScanWriter, Personable, has done the groundwork and internal improvement to assess the software’s value to financial institutions, including an even ROI upon the first implementation.
ScanWriter converts check images into a cornucopia of perfectly presented data, whether in an Excel doc for easy scrolling or a PowerBI visualization with accessible graphs and tables to communicate the big picture. Any chance of duplicate data, human error, or incorrect conclusions? None. ScanWriter has extensive cleansing algorithms to ensure you’re looking at 100% accurate data.
“Not all the data is normalized in a good table format [speaking of Adobe]. Other software will jumble all the data — so it would be hard to analyze that. ScanWriter can take any document, whether a bank statement or check image…and we can normalize it and put it into a table format so you can analyze the information quickly and ef