Provisional Credit, Immediate Benefits

Hours spent in the countdown room reconciling cash drawers and writing deposits by hand. More time spent driving to the bank and standing in line to make deposits. Add inaccuracies, shrinkage, lost sales hours and security vulnerabilities to the equation, and it becomes clear why many retailers are considering electronic cash management programs.

In the case of SafePoint, an integrated cash management solution from Loomis, popularity really began to take off in 2007. That’s when Loomis’ banking partners saw the advantage of offering their retail customers provisional credit for deposits in conjunction with SafePoint, according to Roger Francoeur, regional sales manager for the Houston-based company.

Loomis now has more than 3,000 SafePoint units in the field. It targets customers with high levels of cash intake like grocery stores, fast-food restaurants, convenience stores, resorts and sporting complexes, and has more than 30 banking partners.

Making the money work
NCB, a federally chartered savings bank based in Washington, D.C., has used another Loomis solution, Virtual Vault, to extend cash management services to retail clients across the country – even in areas where it has no physical presence.

“We worked with Loomis and leveraged their cash distribution network in order to provide currency services to our long-term client relationships,” says Thomas Mayhew, senior vice president, deposit production for NCB. “Instead of having a bank branch, we basically had a Loomis branch to fulfill that need for us.”

NCB chose to add SafePoint to its Virtual Vault service in early 2009. It developed a file interface between the Loomis operating system and its own system that allowed the bank to get deposit information electronically and put a provisional credit in the client’s account.

“Prior to using SafePoint, we were unable to offer full-service banking,” Mayhew says. “The technology is very sophisticated. For example, if we have a chain of QSR restaurants in North Carolina as a client, we will create interfaces between Loomis, each location’s safe and our operating system. Then, as currency is deposited into the client’s safes … the interfaces allow us to provide provisional credit for the deposit to the client’s account.” Even though the currency is still at the restaurant location, the money is “working for the client,” Mayhew says.

Bank clients actually gain quicker access to capital with the SafePoint system than would be possible banking at a bricks-and-mortar location across the street, Mayhew says. Quicker access to capital is even more important in the current economy: “That’s the true value of using SafePoint,” he says.

Another benefit for multi-state retailers: Virtual Vault offers the ability to streamline the banking process by doing all banking with a single institution.

The Loomis solution also provides benefits for financial institutions. With Virtual Vault and SafePoint, “we can leverage existing cash vaults,” Mayhew says. “We don’t have to build more locations to service client cash and coin needs.”

And, because there is no travel required with Virtual Vault, “you can greatly reduce shrinkage associated with cash not getting from point A to point B,” he says. “Deposits go directly from the register to the safe and into the customer’s account. From a risk management perspective, it’s something that a lot of controllers and CFOs really like because they have the ability to log onto the NCB online banking system to see what the cash drop at each location was for the day.

“They can know what their cash position is at all times because the system is completely real time,” Mayhew says. And through provisional credit, the retail client can pay down a loan, take advantage of discounts or earn interest on working capital.