At the recent ATMIA Europe conference in London cash dispensing ATMs were left out in the cold as self and assisted service machines sparked the interest of attendees. Billy Bambrough attended the conference and spoke to a the big providers about their new ATMs
From increasing financial inclusion to providing loans, ATMs are no longer just expected to dole out cash to users. The traditional ATM vendors have shown surprising initiative when it comes to moving with the technological demands of the banks and their customers.
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Rather than wait for a disruptive upstart to bring about change the big three vendors, Wincor Nixdorf, Diebold and NCR, are all well on the way to being able to operate in a cashless world.
When ATMs first broke on to the scene in late 60s it heralded the beginning of the end of branches and tellers. Why would a bank pay someone to do what a machine could do for a lot less?
It’s taken almost 50 years but the tech is now at the stage where almost every function performed by a branch teller can now be done by an ATM, either entirely autonomously or with a sole teller shepherding a balance of ATMs.
The unofficial theme of the exhibition was ‘Moving into a cashless world’ and in all the demos on show cash played a distinctly minor role, giving way to machines designed to help people with all kinds of other banking services.
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By GlobalDataThe new ATM – A bank in a box
Wincor Nixdorf demoed a range of different machines, with cash dispensing being far from the headline feature in any.
Jens Bohlen, global VP of banking at Wincor Nixdorf told RBI: "We are showing machines around the three topics that are important to us and our banking strategy: cash cycle management; omni channel customer experience and intergrating channels, and the new way of setting up the bank branch."
Bohlen explains that ATMs are no longer about just the machine fulfilling a function. "It is important now that banks are able to put the ingredients of self and assisted service together," says Jens.
The design of the user interface, the options you give to the end customer, and how you integrate the ATM with the back end systems of the bank are, according to Bohlen the big challenges for the Germany based ATM vendor.
Bohlen confirms that Wincor’s strategy is still on track with the message from Wincor’s annual event Wincor World, where attendees were told that the lines between banking and retail services were being blurred.
Bohlen says: "Banks are now trying to position themselves more like retailers and banks are learning from the retail industry how to serve customers.
"In the past we were pretty focused on cash handling but looking to the future we need to concentrate on the customer experience and bringing additional services to the end user."
Diebold have a similar message, presenting their own array of self service machines which, like Wincor, all feature big touch screens with a focus on more complex self service features.
Diebold are keen to provide their clients with a all round service, offering to run banks ATM network for them.
Diebold president and CEO Andy Matte told RBI: "While only a small percentage of our customers currently take the option for us to run their system in the mid-term we’re looking at 60% of our revenue coming from services and software."
Matte claims that already the amount of interest the company is getting in running software as a service is building with more c-level conversations happening around the topic every quarter.
NCR demoed similar ATMs, the self service machine and the assisted service machine being the big ticket items for the show.
Rachel Nash, industry director at NCR, told RBI: "The new generation of machines allow the teller to be front of house with a focus on relationship building, up-selling and cross-selling."
Nash is keen to stress that the automation of tasks will free up more time for employees to be working more closely with customers.
The machines that NCR are demoing are able to give additional control to a roving teller who can man multiple assisted service ATMs, similar to self service checkouts at the supermarket.
Cash is the number one payment method
Nine out of 10 payment transactions around the globe are handled in cash and the number of banknotes in circulation keeps on growing. According to the European Central Bank, on average six to seven percent more Euro notes were issued in each of the past five years. The same increase applies for US-Dollar banknotes, according to the Federal Reserve.
However, cash handling is expensive: According to surveys by Wincor Nixdorf, the total costs amount to more than 300 billion dollars worldwide every year. The lion’s share is incurred in retailing and at retail banks, with the remainder spread over transportation and cash handing by CiT operators and at the central banks. The reasons for this are very time-consuming, often manual cash handling processes. For example, the costs for depositing cash at a bank branch’s front office are seven times higher than at a self-service system.
ATMs and up-selling. A clash of concepts? – Expert opinion
A thread runs across all the major ATM vendors: Tellers will now have more time to build relationships and sell to customers.
Up selling? Cross selling? That doesn’t sound like any bank strategy I’ve heard lately.
Scared by recent miss-selling backlashes in the form of PPI and, to a smaller extent, packaged accounts, banks are generally moving away from rewarding front line staff based on sales figures and instead trying to reward based on customer satisfaction scores.
One of the biggest drivers of customer satisfaction is having a person, a flesh and blood physical person, available for the customer to speak to, explain to, to reason with.
Customers consistently say that they want to be able to deal with a real person when it comes to their banking but ATM strategy and the move to automation seems to be far more about the bank saving money than about attaining that banking Holy Grail: Customer centricity.
