US-based Advanced Financial Solutions (AFS) has been awarded a contract to help build a national cheque image archive in Singapore.
The archive will house digitised images of all paper cheques deposited and cleared between the country's banks. Once the archive is fully operational it will store electronic images of every cheque written in Singapore, eliminating the need to transport paper cheques between bank branches and the country's central clearinghouse facility.
AFS President and CEO Gary Nelson, comments: "Our involvement in the Singapore project puts us at the forefront of the next bold technological advancement in the world banking industry - large shared digital cheque archival, retrieval and storage systems."
The Singapore Clearing House Association is establishing the National Image Archive (NIA), an essential element of a sweeping modernisation initiative. The initiative builds upon the country's current electronic clearing, archival and retrieval systems to create a paperless inter-bank clearing process, known as cheque truncation.
AFS has been contracted to build the archival component for the project based upon its ImageDepot software technology. The company is also one of three preferred providers of cheque image capture technology to Singapore banks. Banks installing AFS ImageVision will use the system to capture images (front and back) of cheques. Those images will be used in lieu of paper for inhouse processing and transmitting via high-speed broadband communications links to the national archive.