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L.N. Revathy

Coimbatore , May 2

NEWGEN Software Technologies is ready with a stack of products that support cheque truncation (the use of electronic or scanned image of a cheque for processing). This technology, when implemented, would transform the working of the Indian banking industry, says Mr Punit Jain, Vice-President (Sales and Marketing) of Newgen.

The company is hoping that the apex bank would clear the cheque truncation proposal soon. "The technology will curtail or eliminate the physical movement of cheque from one branch to another or between banks and clearing house. The scanned image will serve as an electronic record," he told Business Line.

But why should banks retain cheques in electronic form? Mr Jain contends that this would be yet another data that banks would need to archive or store in an automated storage environment, for easy retrieval.

Stating that banks worldwide spent millions of dollars each year to process cheques, Mr Jain said, Newgen's image capture technique helped integrate this (process) with various other processes. "The reduction in clearing time will offer significant time benefit to customers and cost savings to the bank. Cheque truncation will enable banks to clear inter-city cheques in a couple of hours and outstation cheques in a day's time as against a week or fortnight at present."

The pilot project is expected to be kick-started in the last quarter of 2005.

To a query on investment, he said: "Banks will need to invest on cheque scanners (the number would depend on volume of cheques being handled every day), workstations and servers. Apart from the basic requirements, the banks need to meet the software requirements for both - outward and inward clearing. Bandwidth and storage requirements have to be effectively calculated during the course of project planning."

He explained that Newgen ChequeFlow enabled processing of the scanned (cheque) images integrating with various transports and back-end systems (TBA/Core). "In addition to the imaging software, banks will have the option to install the software for data extraction (OCR) from cheques and for automated signature verification."

The company also offered the cheque exchange solution for central reconciliation of cheques from different banks.

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