Sterling Savings Bank, of Spokane, plans to open item-processing centers in Spokane and Seattle within the next two months, allowing the bank to do its own check processing and statement printing, which it currently pays others to handle.


Heidi Stanley, an executive vice president at Sterling, says the processing center here, which will occupy about 13,000 square feet of space in the Spokane International Airport Business Park, will create 12 new jobs. Those employees will work for Sterlings newly created processing department, which will be housed in the center along with the banks main mail-room operations, which will be moved there from the banks headquarters downtown.


The planned 5,000-square-foot processing center in Seattle, which also will be located near an airport, will employ eight new workers, Stanley says. That center will serve Sterlings 38 branches in Western Washington and Oregon.


The Spokane processing center will begin testing its systems later this month, and Stanley says she expects both centers to begin processing checks for all of the banks branches by the beginning of April. The centers will be responsible for balancing customers transactions, processing checks written by Sterling customers, and entering information from those checks into the banks main computer system.


Bringing this process in house has allowed us to step over the line from a smaller bank to a larger bank, Stanley says. She adds that handling its own processing should result in a cost savings for the bank and enable the banks branches to become more efficient. Tellers no longer will have to proof transactions for errors because that proofing will be done at the processing centers, Stanley says.


In the future, Sterling also would have the ability to process checks for smaller banks, just as a larger bank has processed Sterlings checks, she says.


To prepare for the new service, Sterling has developed its own courier service to pick up and deliver checks between branches and the item-processing centers, has developed an item-processing department, and has bought imaging and other types of equipment. Stanley declines to disclose how much money has been spent on the imaging equipment.


Later this spring, Sterling plans to begin using the imaging equipment, which will be installed at the centers, to store images of cancelled checks and other documentation on microfilm and to print images of the checks to be included in customers bank statements in place of the actual checks.


Basically, we felt that this was important enough to make it a priority in 1999. We want to have these centers up and running by the second quarter, and we were willing to push other priorities back to later on in the year in order to do that, Stanley says.