Article
Wells' new e-receipt offer at ATMs could spark a new trend
Just weeks after Wells Fargo announced the launch of its new electronic ATM receipt option, consumers and ATM industry insiders have been buzzing about the new ‘green' option.
March 11, 2010 by Fritz Esker — Freelance Journalist, Networld Alliance
Wells Fargo has introduced a new paperless receipt option for ATM receipts, and the move is getting some positive attention.
Wells — ($1.2 trillion in assets) which has more than 12,000 ATMs in the United States, including more than 3,000 in California — piloted e-receipts for ATMs in 2009 pilot with Wells employees. In January, the bank began offering the service as an option to ATM users in San Francisco. Wells has 191 Wells Fargo- and Wachovia-branded ATMs in San Francisco.
Now it's one of three receipt options offered at the end of the ATM transaction. The other two options are to print a receipt with the deposit details and images or to decline printing a receipt at all.
The new, third option allows Wells customers to have ATM receipts emailed to a personal account or to their WellsFargo.com inboxes. For the customer, the ATM's user interface has not changed. And the service follows the user — so even if a San Francisco-based Wells customer visits a Wells ATM in Chicago, he still gets the paperless receipt option.
Alicia Moore, head of ATM banking at Wells Fargo, says the program is run with proprietary software designed in-house at Wells. How the program pulls data and pushes it out to users is, as Well says, not information the bank will release. So industry spectators, whose interest has been piqued by the receipt option, may have to look elsewhere to determine if a texting option for ATM receipts is another paperless receipt option.
Though Wells did not share whether it is considering a texting option, Moore did say that e-mailed receipts do provide customers with an easily accessible record of transactions. Paperless receipts allow customers to permanently store receipts, providing an e-trail similar to the paper trail paper receipts provide.
And having receipts stored at a customer's e-mail server or on the Wells Web site aids customers in keeping better records, Moore says.
Soon after word of the paperless receipts hit the Web, industry observers jumped on the opportunity to share ideas. On LinkedIn, a lively discussion within the Banking Automation Markets group proved fruitful for some deeper analysis of the program.
Gonzalo Suarez, a business development and marketing manager at Wincor Nixdorf AG in Madrid and a member of the Banking Automation Markets group, posted a comment about the paperless option, saying despite Wells' claim that it is the first bank in the United States to offer the paperless option, a similar ATM receipt option is already available throughout Spain, but only in the format that eliminates the paper receipt. No receipts, even in Spain, are being sent via e-mail, Suarez wrote.
The background
The idea for paperless receipts was born in 2006, when Wells began offering its online-banking customers the option to receive banking statements online. From there, Wells moved into envelope-free ATM deposits, and the move to a paperless receipt option was just the next logical step, Moore says.
In an effort to be more environmentally friendly, as well as to enhance customer convenience, paperless ATM receipts made sense.
"We wanted to give the customers another choice," Moore said. "We have always wanted to offer options and help our customers go green, if that's their choice."
And early customer feedback has been positive. Moore says one Wells customer insisted the new receipt option "saved his marriage," since he had previously been tasked with always providing his wife his ATM receipts.
Trends / StatisticsDepositsManufacturersNorth AmericaBank / Credit UnionWincor Nixdorf International
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