The United States Automobile Association (USAA)—a privately held bank based in San Antonio, TX—will allow its customers to deposit checks using its iPhone application starting this week. The iPhone application will allow users to deposit checks simply by taking a picture of both sides of the check with the iPhone’s camera. That’s it. The entire process is done electronically, and the physical check can be voided, filed, or discarded. For security reasons, only customers who are eligible for credit and have some type of insurance through USAA are allowed to use the iPhone app’s deposit feature. The bank, which mainly serves military personnel, has 1 million of its 7.2 million customers using their cell phones to access their accounts. For a non-major bank, it is fairly wired, seeing as how Bank of America has 3 million mobile banking users.
USAA executive vice president Wayne Peacock said, “Mobile is going to be a bigger part of how people do commerce and how they interact with their financial institutions, the great value that we see is the time savings.”
Read [NYT]
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