The following is one of 13 commentaries that will appear in the ATM Future Trends Report 2012. Contributors representing several segments of the industry provided their insights on issues and trends they believe will shape the industry during the next five years. To pre-order your copy of the report, click here.

It is great to see a majority response from ATM operators — banks, financial institutions and independent ATM deployers (IADs) — to this survey.

Although the participation from Europe, at just fewer than 20 percent, is lower that I would have liked, it still provides a good representative sample for the region.

Needless to say, mobile technology is the topic of the year. All seem to be convinced that there is a strong need to integrate mobile on the ATM channel. However, I would add a note of caution and point out that here in Europe such service offerings will only capture the interest of the "innovators" class of consumers. This is in contrast to other regions, such as Africa and India, where mobile technologies offer great opportunity to reach the unbanked sections of the populations.

Video surveillance and dispute management solution
ATMeye^.iQ video security management solution reduces the risks of fraud and vandalism, resolves conflicts with clients, and allows monitor security events 24/7 to whole ATM network remotely. Watch ATMeye.iQ video.

The biggest surprise for me was the low ranking on the impact of interchange deadline. One could argue that declining revenues for the industry are likely to have the biggest impact on all stakeholders in our industry. Perhaps the emphasis on increasing self-service to realize cost efficiencies in customer service is seen as balancing out the declining interchange revenues. Declining interchange is a reality in quite a number of European markets in the last 18 months.

In terms of impact, cash recirculation was cited by less than 20 percent of global participants. This seems very low to me when I consider the predictions of significant growth that RBR have set globally for deposit automation (9 percent CAGR) and cash recirculation at ATMs (26 percent) up to 2020.

Looking at the European results in more detail, it is noteworthy that security is still the main threat to the industry in Europe. Despite the rollout of EMV here, our European members eagerly await the deployment of EMV in the United States and its completion in Australia and Canada. All European countries report card data exploitation in the United States and they look forward to seeing this loop closed.

For the European respondents, cash-in and recirculation at ATMs takes second place in terms of trends that are most likely to impact the industry. This concurs with the RBR predictions and with what I am learning from dialogue across the marketplace. The banks, who are the major ATM operators here in Europe, are extremely interested in these technologies, deploying it in part on their estates or piloting or assessing their commercial viability.

This ties in appropriately with the third ranking trend in Europe — cost reduction. In some European markets with strict cash-in-transit, the costs of cash can be as high as 50 percent of the overall ATM operational costs, so identifying a route to reducing the costs of cash is part and parcel of striving for ATM operational and cost efficiencies.

ATMIA Europe has dedicated its second Innovation Forum to cash recirculation at ATMs. Following this forum, ATMIA will work to develop a set of best practices on cash recirculation at ATMs.

I would like to take the opportunity to thank ATMmarketplace.com for conducting this research, which has provided a great insight into the key issues that address our industry both in Europe and globally.

Flora Hamilton is the executive director of ATMIA Europe.