Lighthouse Consulting Group, LLC, (www.lgcllc.biz) has developed two products, CheckFaxRDC and CheckScanRDC, targeted at serving small and home office based businesses with low volume check deposit requirements. In an effort to better understand the characteristics of this market segment, Lighthouse Consulting Group has conducted web based surveys in 2007 and again in 2010-11. The results of the more recent survey are available as a pdf here and highlights are described below.
Highlights
• Small and Home Businesses are very much interested in obtaining the benefits of RDC that are offered to larger businesses, but aren’t seeing them yet.
• 70% of respondents were interested in a way to deposit checks without making a trip to the bank, up from 58% in the 2007 survey.
• RDC penetration of the small business market is very, very low.
• The vast majority of checks are still being deposited using tellers, as in 2007. In the 2010 survey we are just starting to see the use of dedicated check scanners. No respondents reported using cell phones, flat bed scanners, or multi function devices (MFDs) for RDC.
• Small and home businesses have a high value associated with each check deposited because of: 1) having a low deposit volume over which to spread the cost of going to the bank, and 2) often having high value personnel making the trip to the bank.
• For respondents, the average value per check deposited (not the check amount) was $17. This suggest a variable cost RDC solution can charge significantly more per check than is currently being charged high volume depositors.
• Respondents are interested in using a variety of existing devices to enable RDC.
• Cell phones do not appear to be the device of choice for most respondents.
• Respondents are interested in using a variety of existing devices to enable RDC – document scanners, multifunction devices and fax machines; and to a lesser extent cell phones.
• Of those interested in an RDC solution, 54% were interested in using a special carrier to fax checks to their bank.
• Those interested in using a special carrier to fax checks to their bank would be willing to spend on average $.37 additional per check to make the deposit from their office. Different groups have different price points with peaks at $.10, $.25, $.50, and $1.00. While the question was asked to those interested in a carrier based Fax solution, the results could probably be safely applied to all types of RDC solutions.