This week marked the annual BAI RDS conference, one of the year’s last great gathering events for financial institution employees, vendors, consultants, and manufacturers of giveaways that cost less than $2 each and break in less than a week.
Your faithful Gonzo reporter was there, down in the Big Easy (that’s what we hipsters call New Orleans). Things started dubiously when I looked outside my hotel room and saw nothing but one big billboard advertising Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club on Bourbon Street. How could things fail to get better?
With apologies to Larry for not taking him up on his kind invitation, here’s a rundown on things that got my attention.
Add it all up, and there is a growing realization out there that banks and credit unions need to look at all of this in terms of an overall payment systems strategy. Too much fee income is at stake not to.
Several vendors were showing systems that produce combined statements or any other type of form/correspondence using data from disparate systems/sources and adding summaries, images, and detail in one file. Physical, e-mail, and Web delivery can be supported. What was interesting is that these vendors approached customer correspondence as one big, overall topic needing to be managed in total, not in pieces. A nice niche.
An Epson printer that can also scan a check, read the MICR line, create/store an image, and create a TIF or other file that can be used for collection in the Check 21 world. Slick.
Final thought – if this all adds up to anything, it seems like a pragmatic year of making systems work together and focusing on customers and service. Quite the revelation, eh?
Till next year – in Las Vegas, baby.
-tr