Article

Webinar explores opportunities for slashing cash-handling costs

Cash won't be going away anytime soon, but a fair amount of the handling costs could be.

March 30, 2012

Despite predictions of the demise of cash, the amount of currency in circulation is rising worldwide, as are the costs for managing all that money.

In a March 29 webinar titled Cash Cycle Management, Wincor Nixdorf presented scenarios for cash handling in the future and described how retailers and retail banks that bear the lion's share of these costs can achieve optimal efficiency in cash cycle management.

Presenters at the webinar included Flora Hamilton, executive director of ATMIA Europe; Thomas Certa, head of banking solution marketing for Wincor Nixdorf; and Lindsay Hunt, managing director of business development for Wincor Nixdorf Canada.

Hamilton set the stage with an overview of cash flowing around the world today. Ninety percent of all payments globally are still made in cash, she said. In the Eurozone, cash constitutes 80 percent of all payments, while in the U.S. it makes up nearly 60 percent of payment volume.

Certa pointed out the huge cost to maintain all of this currency — €51 billion ($68 billion) in Europe and €53 billion ($71 billion) in the U.S., and he introduced a new solution to help organizations meaningfully reduce their cash costs with "a unique portfolio covering the entire value chain."

The linchpin of this system is Wincor Nixdorf's "intelligent banknote storage," a standardized and secure cash module (including inking technology). This module reports back to a Cash Cycle Management software solution, Certa said.

"[W]e have the software portfolio for the entire cash supply chain … to monitor, forecast and optimize cash as well as to track and to trade and manage the entire supply chain," he said, explaining that the end result is a virtually closed, high-efficiency loop that manages cash end-to-end through the system.

Hunt described how Canada's Bank of Montreal pared more than 20 percent from its cash handling costs using the Wincor Nixdorf solution. During the course of the day, he said, staff had been been counting cash as many as 14 times. Cash Cycle Management greatly reduced time spent on this task and also cut the amount of cash in the branch by up to 30 percent, he said.

"Just taking that cash out of the branch takes away a portion of the counting and handling of the cash; there's an opportunity ... for recycling the cash, leaving it in the cassettes and moving those cassettes from one device to another in order to create better efficiencies and reduce the amount of labor involved — as well as the amount of error in handling that cash. And that in turn results in significant improvement in efforts to balance the branch."

Download the webinar, Cash Cycle Management.