The agreement extends NCR's image-scanning capabilities beyond cheques and payment slips to a wide range of document types across multiple market sectors in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Announced at NCR's first Financial Services Payment and Imaging event in London, the agreement will increase the market reach of IBML's ImageTrac III and IV high-speed scanners and related software under NCR's iTRAN item processing technology brand.

Companies are increasingly looking at new ways to digitise paper documents to improve workflows. Storage and retrieval of electronic data versus physical documents greater reduces costs and offers companies greater geographical access to information. The IBML technology enables financial institutions and other businesses - such as government offices, retailers and insurance providers - to make time and cost savings by using a single transport scanner to process a wide variety of paper documents at dramatically high speeds of 400 pages per minute.

The IBML's SoftTrac, ExportTrac and DocNetics combined suite of software allows the scanned pages to be archived, researched and retrieved via a relational database for ease of reference or to meet legal document retention requirements. The NCR developed F@stImage document solution further enhances the capabilities of the IBML's software via an integrated workflow that allows indexing and keying operations to take place using the captured images.

Chris Gardner, UK and Ireland Director of NCR's Payments Solutions Group comments, "This partnership will not only benefit our existing banking customers who view NCR as a trusted supplier, but will also benefit many corporate users who may wish to automate document management tasks. In addition, we believe NCR's rigorous approach to dealing with large volumes of time sensitive cheques and payment slips in the highly regulated financial services sector will be an advantage to companies in many other industries."

"For IBr IBML, this agreement provides a significant growth opportunity as it will now offer the "best-in-class" high-speed document scanners to countries and markets covered through NCR's strong sales and service presence globally," said Robert Sbrissa, executive vice president of sales and marketing for IBML.