FSTC's Pioneering Work Moves Closer to Eliminating Check Fraud in an Imaged Environment

"By leveraging the opportunities presented in an image environment, financial institutions can now combat check fraud with state-of-the-art technology, identified and tested by an industry-wide collaborative effort," said Rick Pickens, Senior Vice President, Liability Risk Management, Bank of America. "Financial institutions will be able to offer a new level of protection to a customer's check having a security mark. In addition, improved customer protection against counterfeits, forgeries and alterations will make it more difficult for the fraudster."

As the financial services industry moves to exchange check images and reduces reliance on paper-based security features and controls that provided fraud protection over the years, image-survivable features play a critical role in maintaining the integrity of check payments. This important project enables financial institutions to use the next-generation of image-survivable features to better protect their customers, merchants, and other check receivers from loss.

"The Financial Services Technology Consortium's proposed national standard is a major step forward in reducing check fraud," said Blake Prichard, Executive Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Prichard encourages financial institutions to consider adopting pilot programs to test this draft standard and gain immediate check fraud protections for their customers. "Pilots implemented now within a banking organization, and then between financial institutions, and finally among merchants and others will gradually increase the standard's benefits. The result should be a significant reduction in check fraud activity," continued Prichard.

This landmark effort, included nineteen financial institutions, technology vendors, and federal agencies -- Advanced Software Design Corporation (ASD), Bank of America, BB&T, Canadian Payments Association, Cheque Guard, Clarke American, Compass Bank, Deluxe, Federal Reserve, First Citizens Bank, Fiserv Imagesoft, U.S. Treasury's Financial Management Service, John H. Harland Company, JPMorgan Chase, NCR, The National Clearing House, Primary Payment Systems, Softpro, and SQN Banking Systems.

"We are constantly looking for ways to mitigate fraud and keep our clients' financial systems safe," said Glen Sgambati, Chief Data Officer, Primary Payment Systems, Inc. (PPS), an affiliate of First Data Corp. "Fraud reduction is not a competitive issue and this industry-wide collaborative initiative empowers the financial services community to share information to help protect their customers, institutions and the industry as a whole."

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About SOFTPRO

The SOFTPRO Group is the worldwide leading vendor of systems for capture and verification of handwritten signatures. The company is based in Boeblingen, Germany with local subsidiaries in North America (Bear, Delaware), the United Kingdom (London), and Asia-Pacific (Singapore).

The group currently employs an international staff of over 60 people, enabling more than 200 companies worldwide to streamline their document and transaction workflows.

• With its "eSign Workflow" product line, SOFTPRO provides solutions for securing the authenticity and integrity of documents within electronic processes, such as those required for legal contracts. For this purpose, a unique signature technology is used to extract and evaluate both the static and dynamic (biometric) characteristics of handwritten signatures.
• SOFTPRO’s "Fraud Prevention Solutions" portfolio provides a holistic approach to detecting and preventing fraud in paper-based processes (such as payment transactions), as well as increasing operational efficiency using signature management and verification solutions.

Since 2002, the offer to secure electronic documents with handwritten signatures extended the customer portfolio of SOFTPRO to other industries such as banking and insurance, health/pharma, retail, government, automotive and logistics.

Frost & Sullivan, one of the leading growth consulting companies worldwide, presented SOFTPRO GmbH with its "Customer Service Leadership Award 2007" for having excelled in serving its customers and gaining superior customer satisfaction levels. This award recognizes the company that has gained the best insights into customer needs and product demands.

SOFTPRO's shareholders are GE Capital (since 1998), AdCapital (since 2001) founders and management.

SOFTPRO's partners include: A2iA, Adobe, Beta Systems (Kleindienst), Disoft, Fujitsu Siemens Computers / Fujitsu, Gateway, Gijima AST, HP, IBM, Interlink, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motion Computing, Toshiba, TeleCash (First Data), Unisys and Wacom as well as APP Informatik Davos.

Please contact us for additional information:

Parallax LLC
Bill Dorfman
bdorfman@parallaxllc.com
Phone +1 781-235-3424