USAA Bank Will Let Customers Deposit Checks by iPhone | Hacker News Reader

USAA Bank Will Let Customers Deposit Checks by iPhone

nytimes.com

11 pointspeter1239 comments

I've been a USAA member for 10 years now, and they have always been a fantastic and innovative bank. The fact they don't have branches has forced them to do business differently, and for the better!

No lie: my dream was to sell my startup and make a USAA for the rest of us. (USAA really is restricted to active duty and vets, despite the article.)

I think USAA got started because the military used to get ripped off on car insurance all the time. They then expanded into banking, etc.

I'm all for a "USAA for the rest of us" and would love to be a customer.

If a parent or spouse has USAA then you are eligble.

Well, USAA Indemnity is military or dependents only. USAA bank products are available to civilians as well since it's established as a federal savings bank. I remember a CSR telling me that some of the credit lines aren't available. USAA also has a credit union for its employees.

I noticed I can scan checks in my wells fargo ATM. I wonder how much, if any manual checking, is involved since it asks me to confirm OCR'd deposit amount by hand. This seems like a really great logical next step.

It will be interesting to see how well this works. I developed a desktop check scanning application in 2007. We needed good quality scans to make the OCR work reliably. USAA has got to be getting high exception rates with this app, especially with the fixed focus cameras on iPhones before the 3GS.

This is one of the most brilliant uses of the iPhone I have heard in a while.

Now if only I could pay for purchases via credit card by waving my iPhone over an RFID receiver, and use it as a MetroCard…

I know this is not the same thing as "deposit from your mobile", but PNC bank (formerly Riggs) gave me a device (scanner with an ethernet jack) where I could swipe the checks in and I pressed a green button to "send"; deposits made before 7PM Monday-Saturday were made same day :-)

Anybody with a busy business got the same offer as well, at least in our office building; they even threw in a Pitney Bowes self-stamping device for mail.

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