Check processing company stays close to home

“We like this area of town,” President Derron Winfrey said. “We thought it was a logical step to just purchase the lot next door.”

The Winfrey’s check processing and recovery business broke ground Dec. 27 on the $550,000 project that will double its building size to 4,800 square feet.

The current facility – 1615 S. Ingram Mill Road, Bldg. A – will likely be sold to an undisclosed buyer while the new facility – 1615 S. Ingram Mill Road, Bldg. B – should be completed in June.

The two-story brick facility – designed by Burns & Associates and being built by CPC Construction – will house all 10 Electronic Check Services employees.

Derron Winfrey said the expansion should lead to more employees and add to its $2 million in annual revenues.

Electronic Check Services serves 1,500 clients, mostly convenience and grocery stores, in 14 states as far away as Florida and California. Each month it verifies more than 3 million checks and attempts to recover funds from 45,000 bounced checks.

Derron Winfrey predicts the expansion will lead to 500 more clients and 1.5 million more checks to verify monthly.

“We’re expecting business to jump up quite considerably here over the next year,” he said.

Established in 1997, Derron Winfrey said Electronic Check Services’ in-house capabilities have enabled it to capture much of the area’s check processing market. Ramey/Price Cutter, Harter House, Signal Food Stores, Fast & Friendly Convenience Store and Village Mart stores are all clients.

Ramey/Price Cutter’s 39 stores have used Electronic Check Services since 2000 because it’s locally owned and offers customized service, Collections Manager Susan Barekman said.

“They have been a great partner for us,” Barekman said.

Electronic Check Services doesn’t typically charge its clients anything. Instead, it collects a $30 recovery fee from each person who bounces a check at one of its clients’ stores.

The company tries twice to recover promised funds electronically by using routing and account numbers found on a bounced check.

Winfrey noted that electronic recovery is not the forceful withdrawal of funds from unsuspecting people. “It’s already money that (the check writer) volunteered,” he said, noting that signs are posted in each of his clients’ stores.

Electronic recovery is successful more than 50 percent of the time because check writers usually bounce checks in an attempt to “float” funds that are posted within a few days.

After that, Electronic Check Services resorts to writing letters and placing phone calls to recover funds with an overall recovery success rate of 75 percent.

Nationally, Derron Winfrey said, he and his competitors annually process 69 billion checks, and of those, 1 billion bounce.