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ATM benchmarking: Because what you don't know can't help you

A collaborative study by ATMIA and Value Partners provides ATM operators worldwide a (free) yardstick for performance.

April 9, 2014

If you're going to stand tall among your competitors, you must first know their height. Then you must know how much taller you need to grow to exceed their height — and how to make that happen. 

It's a process called benchmarking. And in the increasingly global, increasingly competitive environment of the ATM industry, it's a practice that can be highly beneficial — but that remains surprisingly underutilized.

In the foreword to the "ATM Benchmarking Study 2014 and Industry Report," Mike Lee, CEO of the ATM Industry Association explained the basic purpose of benchmarking:

ATM benchmarking provides a bank or independent ?ATM deployer with a scorecard of its organizational performance measured against its competitors, nationally, regionally and globally. Benchmarking metrics highlight areas requiring improvement as well as current organizational strengths.

Xerox pioneered the science of benchmarking in the 1980s, Lee said. Benchmarking allowed the company to engage in what then-CEO David Kearnes described as "the continuous process of measuring products, services and successful in-house quality improvement process against the toughest competitors or those companies recognized as industry leaders."

For their inaugural 2012 study, partners ATMIA and Value Partners gathered anonymous statistics and qualitative responses from 29 opt-in IADs and FIs, including some of the largest ATM operators globally. Data comprised eight categories:

• general estate statistics;
• cash management;
• transaction management;
• ATM performance monitoring;
• estate management;
• fraud, crime and dispute;
• revenues; and
• quality of services.

Insights from the survey and general conclusions are included in both reports, though the full findings of the study are available only to respondents.

Two-thirds of the original group returned for the 2014 study, which included 42 participants. Results from the second benchmarking study were unveiled at the ATMIA US 2014 conference and expo in Orlando, Fla.

With the 2012 study as a baseline, ATMIA and Value Partners were able to expand, update and build upon conclusions from the first study, creating an even richer and more detailed understanding of the industry in the second report. 

In the video below, Francesco Burelli, a principal at Value Partners and lead author of the report, describes some surprising revelations of the study, which compared the performance of participating ATM deployers against their competitors at the regional, national and global level. 

The general (non-confidential) findings are detailed in the full industry report, which is available free from Value Partners upon request.

cover photo: joshberglund19

Included In This Story

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ATM Industry Association (ATMIA)

The ATM Industry Association, founded in 1997, is a global non-profit trade association with over 10,500 members in 65 countries. The membership base covers the full range of this worldwide industry comprising over 2.2 million installed ATMs.

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