App Lets Bank Customers Submit Paperwork via Smartphones

Xerox is repurposing its Safe Courier app, which lets people scan and send financial documents like loan applications and tax paperwork on their smartphones, for the financial services industry.

The Safe Courier app now lets smartphone users take a photo of a document and submit paperwork to banks, brokerage firms and other financial institutions, according to a Friday press release. The service builds on the growing popularity of mobile check deposits by expanding the variety of documents customers can scan and send on their phones.

"Checks are small structured documents that are uniform in size and format and much easier to scan and process," Raja Bala, a Xerox imaging scientist who developed Safe Courier, said in the release. "As smart phones become equipped with higher resolution cameras, they are capable of capturing, processing and — in the future — recognizing a wide variety of complex documents including a variety of formats."

The Safe Courier app lets users to take photos of documents without pressing a button. Instead, Xerox's technology automatically snaps a picture when the image is clear, then crops and retouches the pages before transmitting them. Mitek and USAA both have similar technology. Customers receive confirmation when their documents have been received and can check on the delivery status of their transfers.

Sarah Todd is a news reporter at American Banker.

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