The changing face of ATMs in the current digital age

Addressing delegates, Pat Cunningham, executive director of ATMIA Africa and Middle East, said the multi-functional ATM is becoming well-established and its presence will increase.

"Right now it is very much market specific and seems to depend upon a combination of the banking behaviours of national customers, how banking services were traditionally structured within a country and national financial services legislation."

Multi-functional ATMs

"Currently the ultimate multi-functional ATMs are operated in Europe, namely in Portugal and Spain," said Cunningham.

"Key innovations are taking place around the globe and soon they will be coming to Africa and South Africa," he said, adding that soon Africans will see ATMs where they will be able to dictate the amount they want by voice.

"As we move on, the challenges increase and we should be able to develop new techniques," Cunningham continued. "People are fed-up with the 'press one for customer care, press two for retail, and press three for...'. This makes us lose contact with customers in this digital age. ATMs are going to become a one-stop shop in the future."

He said in Africa the usage of and services offered at ATMs vary extensively from country to country.

Integrate

"In a global survey conducted by Level Four earlier this year, 63% of respondents highlighted that the biggest change to their ATM priorities has been to increase efforts in bringing new services to market via the ATM.

"Almost half of the respondents stated that their biggest focus is to integrate the ATM channel with other banking services such as mobile and internet."

Cunningham elaborated: "Innovative self-service drives these futuristic bank branches. Self-service is used for the simple straightforward transactions and the branch personnel can focus on serving its customers more personal needs and selling the relevant bank services more effectively.

"The challenge for the banks is to balance services and sales, focusing on sales quality management and self-service migration management."

Innovate

There are now ATMs that look like they have been created out of a very large iPad (called ABIL and is operational in Spain), while others - the palm vein biometrics - are currently being rolled out in Brazil by Bradesco Bank.

"In June the first finger vein biometric ATM in Europe was installed in Warsaw [Poland] by BPS and two Turkish banks followed suit in July."

Despite these new developments, Cunningham said the key challenge remains the education of customers to make use of these new technologies.

"This must happen hand-in-glove to ensure that the financial targets for such new services are attained," he said.

"When I talk to ATM estate managers and directors, we always at some stage come to the point where they say, 'I would love to roll out that innovation but our clients tend to view our ATMs solely for cash, or our customers would think that the presence of an advert is slowing down the transaction.'

"So, customer engagement is key!"