CheckAlt News

With the announcement that Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO of Amazon later this year, I decided to spend time this week reading a letter he wrote to shareholders in 2014 that explained the importance of forming a life partnership with a business we believe in, and that it is our job to "nourish and fortify them” with key tools—all of which we utilize at CheckAlt: “customer obsession rather than competitor focus, heartfelt passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and a willingness to think long-term.”

I often enjoy sharing motivational messages with CheckAlt employees, and yesterday I shared an important quote from Ray Dalio with our team: “Own your outcomes.” 

I hope you are all healthy and safe. I am happy to report that Hurricane Eta did not have any impact to us and our operations.

CheckAlt is growing! We are proud to welcome three additional team members: Corporate Counsel Lisa Marie Crews, Director of Product Management Sara Leon, and Implementation Analyst Heather Brooner. Please connect with them via LinkedIn below. In the past month, CheckAlt has onboarded eight new employees in addition to the U.S. Dataworks team, and I am energized by the talent and enthusiasm these new hires bring to our organization.

Speaking of talent, our own Chief Growth Officer Allison Murray was nominated by the Los Angeles Business Journal’s 2020 Women’s Leadership Awards as a top executive in the region. News of CheckAlt’s partnership with Citizens Bank & Trust was also picked up by PYMNTS, and we are excited to share more great news in the coming weeks.

We continue to closely monitor the situation with the U.S. Postal Service as postal delays persist across the country due to the influx of election mail. Our team members are constantly communicating with local postal offices to understand potential impacts through and beyond the election, and will continue to relay updates to you as they are received.

As an essential business, CheckAlt is fortunate to be operating at full capacity in our hybrid mode of team members on site processing your payments while others work virtually. We continue to adhere to local and federal guidelines to ensure the health and safety of our team and their families.

Best and always available,
Shai Stern

We are pleased to announce that Florida-based Citizens Bank & Trust has selected CheckAlt as the bank's lockbox processing partner. The bank had previously coordinated lockbox processing in-house, and will now utilize CheckAlt's regional processing center in Tempe to batch, scan and process items, and deliver payment files for the bank's lockbox customers. Read the full press release here.

While we have seen and read news reports this week of retail closures and staff reductions, as well as the government furloughs in New York, I continue to remain the eternal optimist about the future and the opportunities that lie ahead. One of several positive signs that businesses are adapting and evolving to the changes we are experiencing globally is how Nike is bouncing back thanks to digital sales.

We at CheckAlt are widely known in the payments industry as the largest independent lockbox services provider in the U.S., however the growth of our electronic and card payment solutions exemplifies how we have become the house of payments. The strategic investments CheckAlt has made in talented business leaders positions our company to drive further growth in electronic payments. At a time when other businesses are operating out of fear, we at CheckAlt double down on the success of our strategy and our belief that the best businesses are built in challenging times.

Every day our Product and IT teams are working diligently to improve our applications and the experience you have with our solutions. Please note that our IT Team is coordinating maintenance of our CaptureNet and LoanPay applications for October 4, 2020. A notice has been sent to clients using those application platforms, though there is no client action required. As mentioned last week, the team is also planning an upgrade to TLS 1.2 encryption for our Filexchange servers on October 18, 2020. If you have questions about any upcoming maintenance of CheckAlt’s solutions, please contact your relationship manager.

Stay healthy and safe!
Shai Stern

This week we have welcomed nine new employees at CheckAlt, all of whom will add great strength to our organization. David Peterson, Leilani Doyle, and Dave Depinet, along with three software engineers, join CheckAlt from U.S. Dataworks.

In addition, we have Rebecca Anthony, who joins us after 14 years at Chase to serve as our business lead for our online banking bill pay solution Catch!; Margie Huntley, who brings a wealth of knowledge in customer service and support for banking and treasury management as our Director of Customer Experience; and Kimberly Lang, who built payments solutions with RealPage and brings her mastery of real estate payments to CheckAlt.

We are delighted to add this talented group of leaders to help take our business to the next level. Please connect with them via LinkedIn using the links below.

It is our focus every day to provide excellent service to you, our clients. Earlier today, our credit union team met to discuss how we can better serve our existing clients and more broadly solve the challenges credit unions face in the industry. Please take a moment to look at this LinkedIn post our own Stacey Bryant shared about our meeting.

As you may have read in an email we distributed earlier today, CheckAlt’s IT Team is making an important upgrade to TLS 1.2 for our Filexchange servers. Many of you utilize Filexchange to obtain daily files and reports from CheckAlt, and this security enhancement will further strengthen the encryption of these data transfers. For more information, please read our notice here.

For those who are celebrating Rosh Hashanah, I wish you a happy, healthy, and sweet New Year. This is a time for counting our blessings, express gratitude for the past and pray for the future. Today and all-year round, we at CheckAlt possess and express an attitude of gratitude. We believe that maintaining hopefulness for the future is the healthiest mindset to have, and together we believe the future for CheckAlt and for our clients is bright.

Have a wonderful weekend and please remember to take care of yourselves and each other.

Stay healthy and safe,
Shai Stern

• Rebecca Anthony - LinkedIn
• Dave Depinet - LinkedIn
• Leilani Doyle - LinkedIn
• Margie Huntley - LinkedIn
• Kimberly Lang - LinkedIn
• David Peterson - LinkedIn

On this somber day of memorial to the victims and families affected by 9/11, we took time during today’s company call to remember those who lost their lives as a result of the terrible tragedy and acknowledge the bravery of the first responders. The heroism and kindness that emerged that day and the days after are a reminder that even in the darkest of times our humanity and perseverance is what makes the future bright.

CheckAlt is proud to announce the acquisition of payments software company U.S. Dataworks, a move that strengthens its current integrated receivables product suite to include flexible insource technology. This is CheckAlt's third acquisition in six years.

“Excellence is not a singular act; it’s a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.” I just shared this quote from “The Big Aristotle” Shaquille O’Neill on LinkedIn along with a photo of me and Shaq from close to 20 years ago. The quote resonates with me deeply as I know that with every good habit formed, and with every positive action we at CheckAlt take for our team and for our customers, we further our excellence as an organization.

Earlier this week CheckAlt shared an article on LinkedIn about new data showing a growing dissatisfaction among financial institutions with their RDC and mobile deposit capture solution providers. The question posed was: Is it time to look for a new solution provider? Our short answer: Yes. CheckAlt is consistently innovating our RDC and mobile deposit products for our clients—in fact, we are planning to announce a new version of our business RDC solution DepositGo next week.

PYMNTS picked up our announcement about our new partnership with NXTsoft’s OmniConnect Marketplace to facilitate real-time integration with core providers through our loan payment processing solution for financial institutions, LoanPay. Read the article here. We have more exciting partnerships and new talent joining the CheckAlt team to announce next week.

Stay healthy and safe!
Shai Stern

My heart is heavy with the devastating wildfires in California, those impacted by Hurricane Laura, and the events of this week in Wisconsin. Just as we celebrate each others’ accomplishments, we must also express optimism for the future by standing up for and supporting each other through difficult times. I am grateful for the beautiful business we have built with CheckAlt, the diverse talent that we have attracted and continue to attract to our company, and the culture we create every day with our actions and positivity.

CheckAlt is pleased to announce a partnership with NXTsoft's OmniConnect Marketplace to accelerate payments and simplify onboarding through real-time core connections.

We are delighted by the feedback we’ve received thus far on last week’s announcement about Scrypt, a new endeavor leveraging AI and machine learning to provide an intelligent invoice coding solution. Our Product Team continues to innovate across all of our products, from check processing to card APIs to our online bill pay solution Catch!, and we will have more product innovation announcements to share in the coming weeks.

Mail-in voting has been a top focus of ours as we monitor the actions of the USPS, results of its reorganization, and impacts to our business. While we remain positive about the head of USPS stating that the organization is prepared to handle an influx of more vote-by-mail ballots, we are cautiously optimistic and as such are working closely with our USPS contacts to understand how mail will be prioritized and delivered as mail volumes increase during this election cycle. We will continue to keep you up to date on the latest news from USPS.

As you may have seen on LinkedIn, earlier today I expressed my empathy for the employees at USPS and those who are thinking their online bill payments are actually online. Read the post here.

One of our channel partners reached out to us and asked that I present our strategy and response to the pandemic to a rather large group of product managers focused on receivables. In addition to sharing how CheckAlt is positioned as the house of payments, I had the opportunity to express our dedication to the health and safety of our employees and our business commitments to our clients through the challenges presented over the past six-plus months. There was a thoughtful Q&A portion as well, and I always enjoy engaging further on questions and feedback.

If you would like to arrange a time for me to speak with members of your team on these topics, feel free to reach out to me, Michelle Miklosey, or your relationship manager to coordinate.

Stay healthy and safe!
Shai Stern

CheckAlt achieved an important milestone this week in our trajectory as a universal payments hub for our clients with the launch of Scrypt, an intelligent invoice coding solution that utilizes machine learning and automation to add and manage invoice payments within your enterprise resource planning software.

Scrypt is CheckAlt’s first endeavor into the payables component of treasury management, enabling you to provide intelligent machine-learning technology for invoice scanning to your corporate customers. Whether your customers receive invoices digitally or in the mail, Scrypt can help your corporate customers implement payables automation at a time when they need it most. Scrypt easily integrates with your existing ERP systems, such as property management software Yardi’s Voyager platform, and will automatically identify and match an invoice to the appropriate payment account. Please reach out to your relationship manager for more information about this exciting new solution.

As we continue to monitor the USPS reorganization and heightened concerns about mail delays, our conversations with USPS business representatives remain positive and focused on solutions. At CheckAlt, we have seen some payments that are over a month old coming into our processing centers and are actively enhancing our mail sort processes in response to the systemic USPS changes. It is always our goal to operate efficiently and provide the level of service you have come to expect from CheckAlt.

An article published this week by the Wall Street Journal reminds us of the importance of kindness for our health and success in life. The author, Elizabeth Bernstein, provides 11 tips for being a kinder person a few of which deeply resonated with me and I found worth sharing with our entire team on this morning’s company call as well as with you now:

• Remember your loved ones. Be kind to the people you live with, not just with strangers.
• Be kind to yourself. Being cruel to yourself can lead to burnout.
• Recognize others’ kindness. Thank them by elevating their kindness upward and outward.

We continue to operate at full capacity at each of our sites, sanitizing workstations and reinforcing CDC public health guidelines with all employees. If you plan on venturing out to the beach this weekend, please remember to follow guidelines, watch for sharks in the water, and wear a life jacket.

Stay healthy and safe!
Shai Stern