The history of computing may look like a sinusoid oscillating between the use of distributed intelligence (i.e. processing power) and the connection of unintelligent devices to a centralized greater intelligence whose power they will exploit. Where are we now, when each of us carries a mobile device in his or her pocket hundreds or thousands or times more powerful in terms of processing power, than the desktop computers we were using just a few years ago… yet, until we connect it to the web – or “cloud”, more fashionable – it refuses to perform so many of its functions?
Nowadays, mobile devices’ multi-functionality, flexibility, hyper-connectivity and processing power are “killing” many mono-functional devices all around us: watches, compasses, thermometers, cameras, scanners, notepads, and more – some analog and born decades or centuries ago, others relatively recent. Specialized scanners are no exception – and the rapid growth of mobile remote deposit capture (mRDC), which uses smartphone camera to image checks, provides concrete and measurable evidence.
Yet those devices are not disappearing: watches, compasses, cameras… even scanners! If they want a chance of surviving, they need to stand out: to differentiate, to deliver more, better, faster, or just something different from what their smartphone-based equivalent will provide. When it comes to specialized scanners for check capture – which represent Panini’s core business – we believe that the time has come, today, for “intelligent scanning” to make a real difference and make such devices stand out.
But wait a moment, what do you mean “the time has come”? Check scanners have been around for close to two decades now… but so have intelligent check scanners! They are far from new, and represent the miniaturized version of huge and powerful check readers-sorters, which operated autonomously and required a lot of room (and maintenance!) when checks were much more numerous and they still had to be physically exchanged. But in the late nineties, when personal computing was becoming increasingly more affordable, intelligent desktop scanners still didn’t make a lot of sense because their built-in processing capabilities were just making them more complicated and expensive. They still required an API to run their functions and performance was usually very similar to that of a plain scanner peripheral run by a PC.
A long time has passed since those days and the checks we write are less and less. Which means the cost to process each of the surviving checks will ramp up rapidly, unless we continuously strive to improve the way we process them. That’s why today we finally find strong motivations for Financial Institutions (FI’s), and for the Independent Software Vendors (ISV’s) and System Integrators serving them, to go “back to the future” and express a preference for intelligent check capture peripherals. These peripherals behave differently from what has been the standard for the past two decades and open up new outstanding technical and organizational opportunities that are supported by a sound business rationale.
We are pleased to welcome you to the “How Intelligent Capture Can Help Digitally Transform Your Financial Institution” webinar on 5th October, presented by AITE and sponsored by Panini, in order to let you better understand what this is all about.