Back-Office Conversion (BOC), the recently introduced form of check conversion now permitted by the National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA), allows retailers and billers that accept checks at attended bill payment locations to convert those documents to electronic automated clearing house (ACH) debits in the back office.

This new form of conversion applies to consumer or business checks that do not contain any auxiliary "on-us" fields and are less than $25,000. Under the same rules, BOC also allows financial institutions (FIs) to convert eligible checks received as image files to ACH debits.

NCR's BOC solution enables a financial institution to quickly deploy an easy-to-use, competitive service offering to their commercial customers today. BOC has been integrated into NCR's remote deposit capture solution, ImageMark Commercial Passport, which is already capturing check data and images for electronic deposit processing at thousands of commercial customer sites today.

"BOC is yet another positive advancement that will continue the adoption of electronic check processing," said Dick Wheeler, vice president of marketing for NCR's Payment and Imaging Solutions Group. "Leveraging NCR's remote deposit capture technology, financial institutions can easily enable their commercial customers to effectively 'self-serve' check depositing, and therefore, take advantage of the lower-cost ACH payment clearing network."

ImageMark Commercial Passport captures the check images and data, automatically applies BOC rules to determine eligibility, and converts the transaction to an ACH file for processing. The automated decisioning takes the guesswork out of qualifying a check for BOC. The image of the ACH file can also be routed to an NCR or a third-party archival system.

With NCR's BOC technology, financial institutions can: increase revenues by offering a competitive, value-add service; expand market reach beyond current geographic boundaries that result from paper processing; accomplish earlier fraud detection; and enhance cost-effectiveness by leveraging the same platform for check truncation and conversion.

Merchants and billers benefit from a lower-cost option for electronic clearing of checks, reduced paper-processing costs, earlier availability of funds and return item notification, service consistency without changes to point-of-sale processes or systems, as well as the opportunity to reduce the number of bank relationships and accounts as local depository needs disappear.

In addition to BOC, NCR customers can also leverage other ImageMark solutions for a complete check truncation and archiving solution. NCR provides a single platform for both check truncation and conversion, allowing the routing of the check data and image to the most cost-effective check-clearing method.