It just got easier to open an account with a mobile device.

Online account opening specialist Andera announced today that it has incorporated a feature to let users snap a picture of their driver’s license with a mobile device to cut down on keystrokes. This feature cuts data entry — a pain point, particularly on smartphones — in half, according to the company.

“We know from years of experience that making the process faster and easier can have a huge impact on satisfaction and success rates,” said Ying Chen, Andera’s senior vice president of product management.

Andera is not alone in the area of mobile account opening. Mitek, the imaging category leader, developed mobile account-opening technology last September that is designed to help bankers with tablets onboard customers quickly and painlessly. Kofax, another imaging player, also offers the technology to incorporate driver’s license data into the account-opening process. Kofax’s technology was first implemented with several companies in the auto insurance space in 2012.

“We’re at a point where imaging has advanced to easily lift the data off the image,” Chen told Bank Innovation. “But the data-pull is just the front end of the process.” What sets Andera apart, she said, is what happens after the data-pull — verifying data with credit bureaus to determine whether the new customer will be a profitable one, for example. Andera’s account-opening technology continues to work after the data is lifted from the image to present a fuller customer picture to the banks, Chen said.

Photo account-opening, in other words, saves some time, reduces drop-offs (user that abandon the process) and perhaps reduces errors (though no OCR system is foolproof), but that’s all. “Photo account opening is only a reality if the institution is willing to give a loan based on verification of names alone,” Chen said. There is more work to be done beyond imaging.

Driver’s licenses and other supporting documents are more complex and visually varied than paper checks, where image-banking began. Any user who deposits checks using his mobile device knows remote deposit capture is not foolproof, so the same goes for other documents, and more so. Andera indicated that image capture works about 90% to 95% of the time. Anecdotally, many banks are seeing far lower success rates than that, but exact numbers are hard to come by.

Andera’s oFlows platform takes the photo-account opening process beyond the data-pull, and makes imaging not an end in itself but a piece of a larger process, Chen said.

Imaging may be the latest thing in mobile account-opening, but it’s certainly not the only thing.

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