Med-Psych.com

I've been using Alliant Credit Union as my savings account as they've offered a fairly consistently high interest rate and they've offered nice customer service. I was browsing around the interface today and noticed something new - a product they call eDeposit Plus.

eDeposit is a way to enter my check information for deposits, and the account will get credited immediately - and I just have to mail the check in within a certain amount of time. I'm not particularly interested in this option - as I've been pretty comfortable just depositing my checks into my local checking account and then ACH transferring my money into the Alliant savings account.

More interesting is a new product called eDeposit Plus - this product allows me to scan checks to be deposited from home, and I don't even need to mail the checks in! It will completely elimate any need for me to go to ATM's to make deposits and I can directly deposit them into my Alliant savings account.

Unfortunately, I tried using the service and I wasn't able to get it to work. First, my scanner wasn't wanting to play nicely with their software and Vista. There was a work-around using my own scanning software, but then the system wasn't recognizing the checks. I then tried hooking the scanner up a computer running XP and the software worked fine to scan the check, up until it tried to analyze the check - and again I ran into the same problem. I called Alliant and they said one of their customer support staff will contact me tomorrow to try to trouble shoot the issue. As it seems like a very new technology - I'm not surprised that the process has bugs. While it isn't working now, I'm sure it'll be a nice feature available with most accounts in the future. Hopefully I'll be able to get it working sooner rather than later, as it'll be a really nice feature for me.

I called Alliant and they were very good to deal with. They initially said they needed to have someone from the correct department look into the problem I was having. They called me back and I went over the details. They said they'd need to contact the vendor who is responsible for the service. They called me back the same day and said the vendor reported there had been problems with one of their servers but that the system is completely back online. I used the service tonight and it worked perfectly. Definitely a great option for depositing checks and I'm sure it's the way of the future.

I was talking to the service rep and she mentioned that they are also working on technology where you can take a photograph of the check with your cell phone, and have it scanned in that way for deposit. Very cool concept.