Best Practices in RDC: 
The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective Deployers
Report Published by Celent

Adoption of remote deposit capture (RDC) solutions among financial institutions has been extremely swift and broad based. With over 4,000 financial institutions expected to have launched RDC products by the end of 2007, RDC represents the most rapidly adopted technology in US financial services history.

But the number of client deployments has been unremarkable by comparison. Based on surveys of RDC vendors, aggregators, and hardware manufacturers in March 2007, cumulative client deployments numbered just 112,000, or a mere 38 client locations per deployer. Differences among banks are stark, with highly effective deployers enjoying a hundred-fold advantage in the number of RDC clients deployed.

Celent approached leading RDC vendors, seeking to understand the disparity between RDC adoption and deployment by examining deployers from financial institutions of all shapes and sizes. The results showed that highly effective deployers shared a number of habits.

"Collectively, the first three habits relate to how institutions embrace RDC and how they deal with it internally. The last four have to do with how deployers take to the market. Said another way, the last four habits are manifestations of the first three and form the deployer’s 'public face,'" says Bob Meara, senior analyst and author of the report. "More than any other factor, the first habit separates highly effective deployers from the rest."

The report discusses the seven habits in detail along with the sales, marketing and operational best practices that accompany them. The seven habits are:

1. A robust vision for the RDC opportunity
2. Senior management sponsorship and visibility
3. A realistic risk assessment
4. Significant investment in sales and marketing with clear objectives
5. Involvement of the retail bank at the branch level
6. Specific and incremental sales incentives
7. A sense of urgency

These seven habits define an outlook that has consistently led to successful RDC deployments across financial institutions of all sizes. Conspicuously absent from this list, however, is any mention of highly differentiated or best-in-class products. This is to be expected in a market crossing the chasm. First mover advantage has been huge among the current cadre of RDC-deploying institutions. However, as competition for individual clients increases over time, competitive product and service attributes will become increasingly important.

Also absent from the list is any mention of operational excellence among highly effective deployers. This is a reasonable outcome based on RDC’s adolescence as a product. Like product differentiation, operational best practices will increasingly avail competitive advantage for deployers as RDC matures.

The 50-page report contains 15 figures and 19 tables. A table of contents is available online. Four organizations are profiled: Goldleaf Financial Solutions, RCB Bank, West Coast Bank, and Zions Bancorporation.

Members of Celent's Wholesale Banking research service can download the report electronically by clicking on the icon to the left.  Non-members should contact info@celent.com for more information.

Tokyo - Yumi Nagaoka
ynagaoka@celent.com
Tel.: +81 3 3571 7104

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