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The manufacturer formerly known as...

ATM manufacturer Cross Technologies is introducing a new name, Tranax Technologies, along with several new products at this week's Retail Delivery Show in Anaheim, Calif.

December 10, 2001

Not too far, however. The name also sounds like "transactions," the bread-and-butter of the ATM business.

"We think the ATM will transform into something else," said Tranax President Hansup Kwon. "In the future it will be used to provide new services."

Kwon chose this week's Retail Delivery Show, a trade show that targets financial institutions rather than the independent deployers who have sold most of the 25,000 or so Cross ATMs in the market today, to debut his company's new identity and several new products.

Kwon hopes to attract the attention of financial institutions in attendance with the Kiosk ATM, a machine that "as the name reflects, is more kiosk than ATM," he said. Options offered on the machine include a barcode reader, a second printer, a cash acceptor and a module that reads the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) lines on checks and money orders.

 Deployers can pick and choose options to offer some of the advanced applications mentioned most often by those in the ATM industry: bill payment, ticketing, check cashing and money order issuance, respectively.

 All of the peripherals are integrated into the machine itself rather than in a separate sidecar attachment, which is an option offered by several competing manufacturers. Sidecars are too bulky, too expensive and not aesthetically pleasing, Kwon said.

 Tranax also will display in booth 1228 new members of its flagship Mini-Bank and Nano Cash lines.

The Mini-Bank 1500 is "somewhere in between" the Mini-Bank 1000 (the company's biggest seller) and Mini-Bank 2100 in terms of functionality and price, Kwon said. New features to look for: audio capability and a footprint three inches narrower than the other members of the Mini-Bank family.

 The Nano Cash II is the first ATM to be based upon a Windows CE platform. (Just across the aisle from Tranax, in booth 1223, is software developer KAL, which introduced a CE-based development platform earlier this month. Seerelated story.)

 CE's biggest pluses, Kwon said, are its stability and serviceability. "If it crashes, you turn it off, turn it on and reboot," he said, noting that fixes for the more robust versions of Windows are not as simple.

 In addition to the CE operating system, Kwon said the biggest change in the PC-based Nano Cash II is a larger 10.4-inch screen.

 Commenting on the new machines, Kwon said, "Our intention is not just to stay at the low end of the marketplace. We'll go up, down, wherever the market expansion takes us."

 Tranax can bring new products to market quicker than other manufacturers because it uses components made by business partner Hyosung, Kwon said. The relationship with South Korea's Hyosung will not change.

 "There will be no change whatsoever in ownership or in our relationship with Hyosung or our distributors," Kwon said. "Only the name will change."

 Neil Clark, president of Billings, Mont.-basedATM Express, a Tranax distributor, said he is somewhat concerned by the name change because Cross had established a strong brand identity in its first three years in the U.S. market. But he doesn't think that many of his customers, merchants who buy the ATMs, will notice.

 "A lot of them don't know or even care who makes the machine," Clark said.

 The new name may mark a first step into other areas of the ATM business for Tranax, Clark said, noting that a current hot topic among distributors is whether the company intends to expand into transaction processing.

 Directly addressing the rumors, Kwon said, "That is not our intention, but at the same time we are not going to shut the door for any possible future business opportunities."

 He has investigated entering the processing business because of a lack of interest among the major players in offering what he calls "value added processing," Kwon said.

 "If you want to sell a ticket or even a stamp today, it is not an easy thing to do," he said. "Well, guess what? If we can't find someone to do it, we're going to do it ourselves."

 There is at least one precedent for an ATM manufacturer entering the transaction processing business in Canada, where Triton established a subsidiary called Calypso Canada.

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