One of the challenges faced in the adoption of Cheque Truncation System (CTS) for cheque clearing, is the need to ensure high quality of the cheque images that are transmitted for clearing through the clearing house. If the image is of low quality, then the receiving bank may not be able to accept the image for clearing, resulting in cheque returns. As the cost of processing cheque returns transaction is multifold compared to clearing a normal transaction, it is desirable that the incidences of bad image quality is minimized.
As a fallout of this, central banks of most of the countries adopting CTS, are expecting the CTS solution provider to provide an automated Image Quality Assurance (IQA) engine, which performs pre-determined IQA checks of the cheque images.
3i Infotech has developed an IQA validation engine, which is a standalone tool that is used for performing IQA on any cheque image. Our IQA engine automatically picks images and performs IQA and the results are available in a shared folder for the CTS application to pick up and continue the CTS processing. As such it can be plugged to any CTS system be it our CTS Solution or competing solutions.
As part of our ESPi framework, we allow two versions of IQA. One of the versions uses the A2iA and the other is a tool built indigenously by us without using any third party imaging tools.