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January 30, 2012 by Richard Buckle — Founder and CEO, Pyalla Technologies, LLC

Though somewhat reluctantly, I agree in principle that we will continue to rely on cash when it comes to the very basic transactions. Reading other posts I get a very real sense that it’s just too early to count out the usefulness of cash.

Globally, societies continue to revolve around the ease of payment and anonymity that comes solely with cash, and as much as vested interests may want to see cash phased out, it’s apparent to me that this is more wishful thinking than definitive planning.

Perhaps the dependence on cash is more of a regional manifestation and perhaps it is less visible elsewhere. No matter what, while the deployment of ATMs in some markets is trending downward, in others it is certainly skyrocketing. From Brazil to India to China — where populations are very large and the demand for instant access to cash is tough to ignore, ATMs will continue to appear on street corners and in malls for decades to come. However they may not look quite like the ATMs we have interacted with for years, nor may some services they provide be services we usually associate with these machines!

In my first commentary on this site, back in mid-December 2011 under the heading “How do you see ATMs changing society?” I made the observation that cash is becoming obsolete. “However,” I added (pretty much in recognition of what will be happening in other marketplaces in the coming years), “some of the biggest ATM networks in the world will appear in the most unlikely countries. No, few discussions in the future will be able to ignore the transition or treat lightly the contribution ATMs will be making when it comes to easing communities into ways of doing business we all just take for granted."

And therein lies the paradox: Is it cash that will disappear or is it the ATM card? Will we happily give up the card and be thankful that it has been relegated to history’s dustbin?

I continue to be amazed that skimmers keep being found on ATMs and that, equipped with very low-tech devices, criminals are still pulling sensitive personal information from us when we access an ATM. If cash isn’t going away, maybe it’s time to look for better ways to identify ourselves without resorting to something as easy to compromise as a card. Let’s just get rid of the cards.

I have worked both sides of the street on this subject. Working for Nixdorf in the 1980s, I was present when the first Nixdorf ATMs arrived in Australia — with features that included the heating of several surfaces to better aid the functioning of the ATM, even in the middle of an Australian summer! In the 1990s I worked for Tandem Computers at a time when nearly every known ATM was connected to applications running on this fault tolerant platform. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly all of us at the time were seduced into thinking, “With an ATM such as one from Nixdorf at one end of a communications line and a Tandem at the other, what could possibly go wrong?” And then in the early 2000s we heard of individuals happily collecting card information and PINs almost at will.

There was much about the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report, that was troubling. Yet, as in the movie, Microsoft today has given us tables that become terminals, and graphical interfaces first depicted in Minority Report are now appearing in nearly every futuristic film — inside cars and on their windscreens, as in the latest Mission Impossible film.

But it was the way that Cruise’s character was recognized by electronic monitors as he walked down the street and into a shopping mall that for me signals where this is all likely to end. And sometime very soon. We will all simply be identified in some agreed-upon fashion that we readily and happily sign-up for! Let’s not kid ourselves. EMV and the use of chips may hold off the amateurs but they will provide few obstacles for more determined criminals. Cards will always prove too tempting for a select few within our society.

Yes, cash may disappear and I am sure it will in time. But not for many years or from all markets, I suspect. However the credentials I will need to pull much-needed cash from an ATM may undergo serious revisions in the near term, and among the considerations that will garner considerable attention I suspect will be the demise of the ATM card.

We should have no more occasions where, standing in front of an ATM and scanning the mirror above us we wonder, “Who’s that behind me?” Or where we run our hands around the ATM enclosure looking for pinhole cameras thinking, “Am I being watched?” Biometric ATMs have already been deployed in some regions where literacy is an issue, but I am looking for something far more sophisticated and secure — with no disembodied fingers offered on eBay.

New ATMs by NCR already deployed in Brazil are identifying customers by the patterns of veins in their hands, so it seems. ATM vendors have made it very clear of late that our biological makeup will be the key to our individual identity as well as to the safeguarding of our identity. But I won’t be all that happy if our identity is left to biologicals that could easily be cut off!

What we should choose to uniquely identify ourselves is something experts will argue about for some time. But I suspect satisfactory ways will find marketplace consensus, and for that I will be only too happy. As I pull ever more cash from the nearest ATM I sure wish all I had to do was to yell at the darn thing. To quote a memorable line from another Tom Cruise movie, Jerry McGuire, perhaps someday all I’ll need to convey is, “Show me the money!”

About Richard Buckle

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Richard Buckle is the founder and CEO of Pyalla Technologies, LLC. He has enjoyed a long association with the Information Technology (IT) industry as a user, vendor, and more recently, as an industry commentator, thought leader, columnist and blogger. Richard participates in the HPE VIP Community where he is part of their influencer team.

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