MARLBOROUGH, Mass. — As winter tightens its grip on New England, Digital Federal Credit Union's far-flung membership gets even more scattered as the snowbirds head south. That doesn't mean they have to completely fly the coop, though, and that's one reason why DCU has deployed the DeposZip consumer remote deposit capture service from EasCorp. Now members like Janet Boush, who's spending the cold months in Florida again this year, can simply scan and submit those pesky little rebate checks (and the occasional check from a family member) without spending more money and time than it's worth taking them somewhere or mailing them in. Boush said she uses an inexpensive scanner-"Just an HP flatbed I bought at Wal-Mart, nothing special"-and her credit unions' rebranded PC Deposit service to avoid making the half-hour drive from Marco Island to Naples. "This service, first and foremost, allows us to compete for member and potential member business, including those whose whole PFI relationship is primarily based on having physical access to a branch," said Craig Roy, vice president of support services at $4.3 billion DCU (www.dcu.org). "Now we basically can put a branch in the homes of every one of our 350,000 or more members," he said. For the moment a leading-edge service, remote deposit capture is likely to quickly become mainstream, said officials at Burlington-based EasCorp, which developed its own in-house solution. Twenty-eight credit unions have signed up so far for the solution in its first year, said George Dow, vice president of business development for EasCorp, which Dow said is the only corporate to offer the service for both the consumer and merchant channels. The DeposZip service can accommodate different ways of posting transactions to meet the credit union's internal needs. That includes downloading them as files from the corporate's administrative platform and posting them to a member's account or using real-time channels through shared branching or a direct-posting interface to the credit union's core processing system. DCU currently posts three times a day using file downloads but is looking at moving toward the real-time system, Roy said. The credit union also is looking at new ways to expand DeposZip's adoption among its membership. "When we rolled it out in March, we just put it on our home banking product and let the members find it, then we began using e-mail blasts, newsletters and Web page marketing," the DCU vice president said. "We just finished our second marketing strategy, which was basically using cash incentives to get our members to utilize the service. Depending on volume, we paid some members up to $30," he said. Even without charging for the remote deposit service, the savings from using remote deposit compared with the more physical channels bring a positive return on the investment within easy reach, Roy said. "But that isn't the biggest driving factor for us," Roy said. "To be honest, we want to really continue to concentrate, too, on the consumer space, serving existing members who find themselves without access to a branch and reaching out to potential members who don't have that access either. This is a very efficient way of doing that." It also is quickly becoming expected, EasCorp officials aid. "We see remote deposit capture becoming such a ubiquitous service, so standard in home banking, that in very short order it will be something that credit union members demand and would not consider using an institution that did not offer this service to them," Dow said. –[email protected]