NEW YORK, Oct. 22, 2008 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Viewpointe(r), a leading provider of check image exchange and archive services to financial institutions, today released research exploring the decision-making processes associated with outsourcing check image archives. This industry whitepaper entitled "In-House or Outsourced Image Archive Services: Plotting Position and Course" was developed with the independent research firm Financial Insights. In conjunction with the whitepaper, Viewpointe released a Customer Experience Profile with BB&T Corporation, the Winston-Salem, NC-based financial holding company, chronicling the bank's remarkable results derived from outsourcing its check image archive to Viewpointe.
These documents are available on Viewpointe's website. The whitepaper can be downloaded at http://viewpointe.com/files/Viewpointe_ImageArchiveWhitepaper.pdf and the Customer Profile is available at http://viewpointe.com/files/Viewpointe_BBTCustomerProfile.pdf.
In the current market environment, financial institutions are under tremendous pressure to cut costs to remain competitive. Sharing resources with other institutions and outsourcing certain functions are two efficient ways to do this. The Viewpointe-sponsored Financial Insights whitepaper, "In-House or Outsourced Image Archive Services: Plotting Position and Course," strongly concluded that outsourcing will become more prevalent over the next few years. The reasons include:
* There is less of a need to maintain images in-house as trust grows that quality images can be obtained quickly, efficiently and at reasonable prices from a trusted archive services provider. * Less expensive communications and advances in storage already enable immediate retrieval of images from outsourced archives. * The current proliferation of multiple redundant images held in various locations will be eliminated, except for disaster recovery purposes.
These factors match the experience that BB&T faced when deciding whether to continue investing in maintenance, resources and upgrades for its in-house archive or to outsource with a trusted archive provider. After extensive research and consideration, BB&T decided in 2002 to outsource its check image archive to Viewpointe and continues to do so today.
"We realized fairly quickly that we could not build an archive with the technical complexity, scale, performance and within our time frame that was on par with the Viewpointe archive," said Joe Brannan, BB&T executive vice president and processing services manager. "Viewpointe is the only service provider that could offer the level of security, speed and disaster recovery protection in line with our strategic initiatives."
Today, BB&T stores 100 percent of its primary check images in the archive, and experienced zero downtime during the transition. BB&T currently exchanges and stores millions of images daily through Viewpointe -- well beyond even the greatest capacity of its original proprietary archive. BB&T estimates that its potential cost savings reaches into the millions of dollars.
"The decision-making process experienced by BB&T is not unlike the other financial institutions that we evaluated in our study," said Financial Insights analyst Aaron McPherson. "We found that most forward-looking institutions understand that there are long-term strategic benefits to outsourcing their check image archive to a trusted provider, especially as check volumes continue to decline."
Strategically, BB&T concluded that the considerable financial, technical and labor investments needed to build an in-house archive would take resources away from key business drivers ultimately requiring the investment of additional resources. BB&T, like other financial institutions, found itself under increasing pressure to reduce resources and infrastructure costs. Sharing costs with other institutions and outsourcing technology investments, such as an image archive, can often alleviate these costs. This way, organizations pay only for what they use, eliminate redundant resources and dedicate more time to their strategic business objectives.
"There was never a question of whether or not Viewpointe could deliver the quality of service we required; they were already doing it for the largest banks and check volumes in the country," said Brannan. "We knew that outsourcing was the right decision for us...and it's probably the right decision for many other institutions out there that would prefer to grow their business, rather than their in-house archive."
About Viewpointe
Viewpointe(r) is a leading provider of check image exchange and archive services to financial institutions. Viewpointe operates the largest national archive of check images and information. It offers bank-to-bank image exchange through Pointe2Pointe(r) and is the only institution able to provide image exchange on demand through ImageShare(tm). In 2006 and 2007, Viewpointe was one of the youngest companies named to the prestigious FinTech 100 surveys. Viewpointe clients include: BancorpSouth, Inc., Bank of America, BB&T, Bremer Financial Corporation, Colonial Bank, Compass, Fifth Third, First Horizon National Corp., Fiserv, Inc, Cullen/Frost Bankers, Inc., Harris Bank, HSBC Bank USA, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., National City Corporation, SunTrust Bank, Synovus Financial Corp., U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo and Zions Bancorporation. Industry connections include Federal Reserve Financial Services and PaymentsNation via Endpoint Exchange. For more information about Viewpointe, please visit http://www.viewpointe.com/.
The Viewpointe Archive Services LLC logo is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/prs/?pkgid=3076
About BB&T
With $137 billion in assets, Winston-Salem, N.C.-based BB&T Corporation (NYSE:BBT) is the nation's 14th largest financial holding company. It operates nearly 1,500 financial centers in 11 states and Washington, D.C. More information about the company is available at http://www.bbt.com/.