An accounting firm partner wraps up the audit of a West Coast company on Friday afternoon and gets a five-figure check. Rather than carrying it back on the plane to her East Coast home and turning it into accounting on Monday, the partner uses a service implemented by the accounting firm's treasury department. She whips out her BlackBerry, scans the check and transmits the image to her firm's East Coast concentration bank account, where the funds are swept into interest-earning investments. This same scenario plays out for a consultant with an iPhone or a college fund-raiser with an Android or a salesman with the right smart phone. As treasury technology sweeps forward, remote deposit capture has joined the mobile revolution.

"We've entered the realm where you don't need a physically stable scanning device for remote deposit. Someone in the field with a smart phone can do it on the spot," says Gary Brand, director of Source Capture Optimization at Fiserv in Brookfield, Wis. Getting the right lighting can be a challenge, especially for mobile devices without flash units, but after a few tries, the operator learns how to get a usable image, he says.

Fiserv started testing its Mobile Source Capture product in pilots last December and in August began to make it available to treasuries through banks. The service also lets treasuries consolidate multiple collection points down to a single operations center where staff can bring together incoming check payments and prepare a clean deposit, Brand explains.