Mitek Delivers New Way to Pay Bills: Mobile Photo Bill Payment

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Bank customers will soon be able to pay old-fashioned paper bills the modern way by simply snapping pictures of the bills with their smartphones, Mitek Systems, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: MITK) (www.miteksystems.com) announced today.

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With Mitek's new Mobile Photo Bill Pay™ app, users can submit electronic payments from their smartphones without having to write checks, lick stamps, visit a payment location or even use their personal computers.  They simply take pictures of the bills and Mitek's Mobile Photo Bill Pay does the rest -- correcting image distortion, reading relevant data and processing the transactions through the users' banks.

Mitek will showcase demonstrations of Mobile Photo Bill Pay in Booth #949 at the BAI Retail Delivery Conference & Expo, Oct. 19 – 21, in Las Vegas. At launch, Mobile Photo Bill Pay is available for inclusion in mobile applications for iPhone devices from Apple, with Mitek soon supporting a number of other smartphones and operating systems, including BlackBerry, and devices that run on the Google Android and Microsoft Windows Phone 7 platforms.  

Mobile Photo Bill Pay is highly secure, accurate, fast and easy to use.  The application allows financial institutions to give their consumer and business customers a convenient and flexible new option for quickly paying their bills. For example, during a stop for coffee between appointments, a busy consultant could use his iPhone to point, shoot and pay bills for his office rent and professional association membership fees.

"In today's fast-paced world, we work and play from anywhere, making smartphones the devices of choice for those always on the go," said Mitek CEO James DeBello. "More and more, we're managing much of our lives through our smartphones, and Mitek has created a breakthrough way to pay bills anywhere, anytime."

After establishing online-bill-payment arrangements as part of their banking, cash management or credit union accounts, users of Mobile Photo Bill Pay can initiate e-bill-payment sessions on their smartphones, then simply snap photos of the bills they want to pay, verify the payment information and click on the app's "PAY" button.  

Mitek's patented IMagePROVE™ technology addresses the challenges of capturing an image with a mobile device with high accuracy for data extraction. Transactions conclude with verification that the users' bills have been paid and electronic payments have been sent from their financial institutions.

Key attributes of Mobile Photo Bill Pay include:

• The app eliminates the hassle of users setting up information for individual payee accounts because Mitek technology extracts the data from the photo image and automatically provides it to the financial institution's bill-processing system in the required format;
• Users need to photograph their bills only once and payee information is automatically saved in the application's vendor list for future use;
• The app is template free, which provides a superior customer experience for the user and low cost of ownership for the bank thanks to Mitek's dynamic data-capture capabilities. A template-free platform supports a wide range of bill formats, making it a turnkey solution for banks.

Mobile Photo Bill Pay integrates easily into existing mobile banking applications and also benefits financial institutions by:

• Enhancing their mobile banking applications with best-in-class features;
• Allowing them to extract pertinent customer-account data from bills via optical character recognition / intelligent character recognition (OCR/ICR);
• Keeping all customer communication, image processing and data extraction completely encapsulated and secure.

"This is another example of how our core competency and patented technology in secure image capture, analytics and processing can be applied to a new area for the benefit of both users and the financial institutions," said DeBello.  "In an era being defined by the intimacy and utility of smartphones, we see Mobile Photo Bill Pay as a major convenience for users and one more way for the financial institutions to strengthen bonds with their customers and ultimately increase loyalty.

"What really differentiates Mitek is the dynamic extraction of data from any invoice or bill, regardless of layout," he added. "That's not easy, but our process makes transactions simpler for the user, results in a superior consumer experience and lowers the cost of ownership for the bank."

DeBello said Mitek has applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for a patent on image-related processes performed by Mobile Photo Bill Pay.

Mobile Photo Bill Pay joins Mitek's patented Mobile Deposit® application, the most widely deployed mobile remote data capture (RDC) capability for financial services, which allows users to deposit checks simply by snapping photos of their checks and transmitting them to their banks.

DeBello said Mitek is now in discussions for the distribution of Mobile Phone Bill Pay with a number of leading banks, integrators of technology solutions and applications services providers for the financial services industry.

For more information visit www.miteksystems.com. A video on Mobile Photo Bill Pay can be seen here.

About Mitek Systems

For more than 20 years, Mitek Systems (OTC: MITK.OB) has provided financial institutions with advanced imaging and analytics software to authenticate and extract data from imaged checks and other financial documents.  Mitek's patented technology is currently used by all leading financial organizations in the United States to process more than 10 billion items per year.  

Today, Mitek is applying its patented technology and extensive expertise in image correction, optical character recognition and intelligent data extraction to mobile devices.  Using Mitek Mobile Apps, smartphone users can now deposit checks, pay bills, save receipts and fax documents while on the road or sitting at a desk -- eliminating trips to the bank, Post Office and file cabinet.  Simply take a picture of the document and Mitek does the rest -- correcting image distortion, extracting relevant data, routing images to their desired location, and processing transactions through users' financial institutions.  

For more information about Mitek Systems, contact the company at 858-503-7810 or visit www.miteksystems.com.

SOURCE Mitek Systems, Inc.