LONDON - The payphone, which has suffered in recent years because of the ubiquity of mobile phones, may be getting a new lease of life through a joint venture between British Telecommunications (BT) and Travelex.
According to a report on Silicon.com, the two companies are currently testing phone kiosks which double as ATMs. If successful, they will roll out a further 300 later this year.
The Travelex-branded trial kiosks are already in place in Portsmouth, Southend and Sutton in Surrey. They are being placed in town center locations where there isn't an ATM in the immediate vicinity.
While Paul Hendron, director of BT payphones, claims the business is still healthy, with 21 million customers per year, he did admit to a 50 percent decline in business over the past three years, brought about largely by widespread mobile phone use.
According to Hendron, the Travelex deal is more about "location sharing" than about targeting specific customers who want to withdraw cash and make a call at the same time.
BT has been experimenting with offering different types of functionality to customers via its network of more than 100,000 payphones.
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