News

Big ATM on campus

NOVA Savings Bank hopes that offering advanced ATM functionality at Villanova University may help it displace the school's incumbent ATM provider.

December 28, 2003

NOVA Savings Bank hopes its big ATM on campus -- a Web-enabled Fujitsu 8015 with the ability to offer personalized transactions among other advanced functionalities -- may help it displace a big bank from Villanova University.

NOVA, a $330 million financial institution with four branches in the Philadelphia area, in August installed the machine at the Jake Nevin Field House, where Villanova's athletic department and ticket box office is located. In partnership with the athletic department, NOVA is using the ATM to distribute basketball tickets to students.

Villanova, a famously sports-crazy school with a 19-year waiting list for season tickets, reserves 1,500 tickets for students for each home game. Its 6,100 students compete for them via an online lottery. The ATM distribution will allow students to collect tickets anytime, not just during regular box office hours, and will also dramatically reduce the athletic department's workload.

To collect tickets at the ATM, a student simply swipes his Villanova identification card. The ATM connects to a ticket database via the university's LAN and dispenses a preprinted ticket stowed in a cassette if the student is a lottery winner.

NOVA Savings Bank is using this Web-enabled ATM to offer a specialized ticket distribution system at Villanova University.

Brian Hartline, the bank's president and chief executive, believes NOVA's willingness to offer the ticket service may help it replace Wachovia, Villanova's ATM incumbent, when its contract expires next year.

Even before basketball season began, the ATM won new business for NOVA. Hartline said some 30 university employees opened accounts in three months. He expects to see more new accounts during basketball season.

"We're going to have 1,500 students coming to the ATM two times a week, 16 times a year. That's a lot of exposure," said Hartline, noting that the ATM will help introduce NOVA to an attractive, technology-savvy demographic -- some of whom may be making their first decisions to open a bank account.

To play up the Villanova connection, NOVA offers debit cards featuring a graphic of the university's athletes.

"To compete against the big guys, smaller community banks like us need to provide a different experience for our customers," Hartline said.

"Getting away from the green screens" at ATMs is one way of doing so, he said.

Prism 1:1, an application that Fujitsu created with software developer mCom Financial Solutions, produces graphics more eye-popping than anything possible in an OS/2 environment. A basketball graphic used for the Villanova deployment, seen in the exhibit hall at the recent BAI Retail Delivery conference, featured a bright orange, pebbled surface that looked real enough to toss up for two points.

More than just a pretty screen

It will also allow NOVA to offer personalized ATM transactions and marketing campaigns to its customers.

"It's more than just a pretty screen," said Dan Stechow, mCom's chief operating officer. "This is the same kind of functionality that the mega banks were paying eight figures to produce a few years ago."

To test Prism 1:1, NOVA will ask a number of students to customize their transactions via PCs using the university's intranet, selecting preferred withdrawal amounts, paper or e-mail receipts and other options.

Though many ATM owners have expressed concerns about Web-based ATM technologies leading to longer lines at machines, such personalization options give customers a quicker, more efficient experience, Stechow said. "You're using the Web to help the customers get to what they want sooner."

Targeted marketing

Prism 1:1 also offers the ability to "offer the right product to the right customer at the right time" by inking to a bank database and sending targeted marketing offers to users, said Craig Deutsch, Fujitsu's marketing program manager.

An earlier pilot with California's Downey Savings and Loan showed that such campaigns are effective, Deutsch said. Of 35,000 pre-selected Downey customers who saw an offer for a line of credit during an ATM transaction, 18 percent responded that they'd like more information. Of those 18 percent, another 18 percent actually took the offer.

Interestingly, several customers who didn't get the offer but heard about it from other customers called Downey about the ATM ads, Deutsch said.

"A bank could call a customer on his cell phone or send an e-mail to his desktop after he said 'yes' to an offer at the ATM," Deutsch said. "That kind of response will knock a customer's socks off."

With Prism 1:1, ATM owners can monitor customers' responses to marketing campaigns and change ineffective campaigns on the fly, Stechow said.

Monitoring customers' responses to offers is especially valuable for smaller financial institutions, which typically do not have as much money to spend on market research as their larger banking brethren, Hartline said.

NOVA is swapping two of its seven existing ATMs in Philadelphia with Fujitsu 8000 Series models equipped with Prism 1:1. Both of the machines, one at a bustling food court and another near a subway stop at NOVA's corporate headquarters, generate some 5,000 transactions a month.

"We've got 5,000 opportunities a month to see whether a person likes a particular ad or not," Hartline said.

At the ATM near the subway stop, NOVA plans to run additional campaigns on a 27-inch color monitor positioned to the left of the machine. The monitor gives NOVA a chance to capture the attention of customers and potential customers before they walk down the block and encounter a cluster of ATMs owned by banking giant FleetBoston Financial, Hartline said.

Some of the campaigns will promote nearby businesses. The service will be free at first, but NOVA plans to charge for the advertising if it is a success. Other ads will be public service announcements geared to the local community.

"We want people to understand that we're not some big banking conglomerate. We work with the community and we are in touch with them," Hartline said.

Kevin Carroll, director of ATM services for Concord EFS, which drives NOVA's ATMs, said that NOVA is the first mid-tier financial institution in Concord's network to introduce Web-based technologies.

"NOVA is small, innovative and flexible enough to take advantage of these new capabilities," he said.