The days of piecemeal mobile imaging solutions may be behind us.

Document management company Kofax is mounting a challenge to industry leader Mitek by launching a mobile capture platform for enterprises today. The unified platform will allow rapid development and deployment of mobile capture apps, the company announced in a press release.

“It’s the first piece of software for banks to run all their mobile capture software from,” Drew Hyatt, SVP of mobile applications at Kofax, told Bank Innovation. “In the past, check deposit, bill pay, document scanning for account opening were all different platforms.”

The platform is highly customizable to meet each organization’s need and speed up time to market, according to Kofax. Another major project Kofax is undertaking is mobile loan origination, including mortgages.

“Banks can create their own use cases,” Hyatt said. “Image capture is an easier way of doing business.”

The differentiator for Kofax, Hyatt said, is that it handles compliance and workflow management.

As document complexity grows, however, fail rates also grow. Bill pay sees higher fail rates than check deposit. Mortgage origination will likely see higher fail rates than bill pay. The Kofax platform provides detailed information about failures to banks.

“If you can’t measure, you can’t improve it,” Hyatt said.

The processing of images is done, as much as possible, on the device itself for reasons of speed. “Take a picture, clean it, shrink it, all on the phone,” Hyatt said. File size of scanned checks is typically much larger than needed, he said, so Kofax optimizes images with little loss in quality to improve speed and file storage options. If “heavy lifting” need to be done with images, the processing moves off the device to a Kofax server.

Limitations of Mobile Image Capture
For security and compliance reasons, image capture must be performed from within an app, rather than from a mobile browser. This poses problems for image-based account origination since users are less likely to download apps for services they do not yet use. For this reason, much image-based account origination happens on tablets in the branch environment.

In the insurance industry, however, some companies issue “one-off” apps for the purpose of onboarding. This could be used for check-cashing services and the like in the mobile environment. Down the road, HTML 5 may gain access to the camera, obviating the need for apps like this, according to Hyatt.

Kofax has noted that Android devices see higher fail rates than iOS devices. This might be expected since Android, as an open platform, must accommodate a wide variety of screens and systems, while iOS is tightly controlled and only needs to work on iPhones and iPads. This also may explain why banks are more comfortable building for iOS than Android as well, not to mention that iOS users tend to perform larger transactions.

Hyatt envisions a number of use cases beyond traditional financial services functions, such as barcode scanning in stores, which could of course be of interest to banks, as well as video capture. Indeed, image capture and banking is in its infancy. Picture this:  A customer encounters a bank product on Instagram or Pinterest. Tie-ins to social media from imaging companies like Kofax and Mitek could make connecting the right customer to the right product a snap — or a click.

Learn more about what’s next in banking at Bank Innovation 2014 on March 3-4 in Seattle. Request an invitation here.