HOUSTON — Cardtronics Inc. and PULSE, both of which are based in Houston where Hurricane Ike struck Friday night, say they've weathered the storm will little or no impact on ATM operations.
Cardtronics, which operates the largest independent ATM network in the United States, says backup in Dallas helped the company come through the hurricane relatively unscathed.
"Our ATM monitoring, cash management, maintenance management and general corporate activities are conducted in Houston," said Jack Antonini, Cardtronics' chief executive. "Our ATM transaction processing operations are conducted in a hardened data center in Dallas, Texas, 250 miles inland from Houston, and the relevant staff is housed in Dallas, so those operations saw no impact from the storm."
At PULSE, which is owned by Discover Financial Services and processes ATM and debit transactions for more than 4,500 U.S. financial institutions, operations continued without disruption, said Cindy Ballard, PULSE's executive vice president.
"In advance of Hurricane Ike, we enacted our emergency preparedness plan to enable uninterrupted service for our network participants," she said.
Systems continue to function normally on the company's Dallas processing platform.
Cardtronics' Antonini said activities and personnel based in Houston were transferred to backup sites in Dallas, Texas, and Portland, Ore., shortly before Ike hit, lessening the impact of the storm on operations.
"Except for ATMs in the Greater Houston metropolitan area, which have been affected by power and communications outages, our network of approximately 33,000 ATMs is operating normally," he said. "I am also happy to say that there was no damage at our corporate headquarters. The power is on, and we intend to begin migrating operations back to Houston on Monday."
Approximately 327 Cardtronics ATMs in Greater Houston, which includes Galveston, Texas, were impacted by the storm. The company says the ATMS are expected to be back online once power is back on in the area.
