The 119,000-member, $1.8 billion NavyArmy Community Credit Union has found adding ATM check imaginga key part in its battle to gain control of its teller lines.

The Corpus Christi, Texas, credit union has a membership whichhas tended to prefer using tellers, particularly for makingdeposits and cashing checks, according to its chief operatingofficer, Dana Sisk.

“It's just what they like,” Sisk explained. “They like using thetellers even though that means sometimes having longer lines thanwe would like.”

The credit union has 12 branches and is on target to see morethan 2 million teller transactions at those branches this year,Fisk reported.

“It's not that we don't want to see our members,” Sisk said. “Welove to see them. We would just rather see them for other,different, transactions and business other than cashing checks andmaking deposits.”

To try to take some of the burden off the branches, Fisk saidthe credit union has been implementing a digital strategy over thepast 24 months that includes having 12 of its 14 proprietary ATMsaccept imageddeposits as well as, eventually, having members be able to makedeposits over their mobile phones.

Navy Army also has an arrangement that gives its membersfee-free access to ATMs at a regional convenience store chain, butthose ATMs do not accept deposits.

Sisk said the credit union has had to overcome some obstacles onits way to interacting in a more digital way with its members.First, it didn't roll out the ATM imaging capability to membersuntil it was on all 12 of the machines, a development that tooksome months, and then they had to get members to use them, Fiskexplained.

She also said that many members were unused to making depositsthrough ATMs at all and that, in one particularly busy branch,credit union staff rolled ATMs into the lobby and invited membersto leave the line to receive a guided first session with the checkimaging machines.

“We found the biggest hurdle was getting our members to just tryit for the first time,” Fisk said. “Once a staff member showed themhow and once they saw their receipt had a copy of the depositedcheck posted on it, I it got easier.”

Sisk said Navy Army was still rolling its effort out to membersbut added that the credit union had already decided to use thenumber of teller transactions per member per month as the standardby which to judge the program and not just the number oftransactions overall.

“We are a growing credit union so our transactions per month isalways going up,” Fisk said. “The number I want to see drop is thenumber of teller transactions per member per month.”

She is optimistic about the program's success though, pointingout that even with only minimal marketing, Navy Army had alreadyseen the numbers of deposits made through ATMs climb from 3,465 asof the end of June 2012 to more than 8,300 as of the end of June2013.