By leveraging the Viewpointe's industry-shared national archive, the service offers banks with in-house check archive operations image data protection and increased operational reliability in the wake of a system failure or disaster. This added assurance is a growing requirement in a post-Check 21 /image exchange environment.

With variable pricing and infinite scalability, ImageAssure enables banks to have fully-redundant image archive operations, without the capital investment normally required to replicate in-house operations. The service includes simulated disaster testing to ensure seamless transmission between the bank's principal archive and Viewpointe. In a time of crisis such as system failure, virus, or a catastrophic event, ImageAssure service responds as a bank's primary archive enabling the bank to maintain customer service levels and check image exchange activities.

The events of September 11th, 2001 brought check processing to a standstill, exposing the vulnerability and inadequacy of a paper-based check clearing system. As the Check 21 Act goes into effect on October 28, 2004, banks have the opportunity to replace the paper check with an electronic image and bring this vital business function into the 20th century. Viewpointe's ImageAssure helps banks create and maintain backup archives to provide reliable, secure and instant access to their check images in a declared system failure or disaster.

"As Check 21 is enacted and check image exchange becomes more prevalent, an increasing number of banks will rely on the operational capacity of their peers, making business continuity an even more critical feature of bank image operations," said John Lettko, Viewpointe chairman and CEO. "Our customers are requiring appropriate levels of disaster recovery from their check image trading partners, and now we're able to offer the most comprehensive service to help banks meet that challenge."

ImageAssure was built with extensive flexibility - enabling a financial institution to completely configure the level of archive response and scale to changing needs. Images are simultaneously loaded into the Viewpointe national archive and the bank's in-house archive. Standard APIs enable easy integration into existing image delivery and retrieval software applications. At a moment's notice, Viewpointe is able to have image operations back online with minimal impact to critical image functions.