News
The automation revolution
February 14, 2006
This article appeared in the ATM & Financial Self-Service Executive Summary, Winter 2006.
At November's Bank Administration Institute (BAI) Retail Delivery Conference & Expo in Orlando, Fla., companies like Source Technologies, Diebold Inc., NCR Corp., Wincor Nixdorf International and Wausau Financial Systems Inc. showed off solutions that pull the ATM from its silo and back into the branch.
Remote capture is one such solution - a solution Mosinee, Wis.-based Wausau introduced at the teller line in 2001. In the last four years, Wausau has taken that capture solution and implemented it at the ATM.
"Along with our complete back-office item-processing and remittance systems, Wausau can address the complete end-to-end image- and item-processing requirements for financial institutions, as we demonstrated at the 2005 BAI RDS conference," said Doug Turner, Wausau's line of business manager.
Tying the advantages of image- and item-processing and branch self-service together, Wausau also showcased its solutions for lockbox and remote distributed-commercial capture technology, enterprise content management, teller-image capture and ATM-image capture.
The presence of those types of solutions will continue grow, said Ken Justice, vice president of product marketing and management for Diebold.
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"This notion of assisted self-service - a hybrid model with some assisted self-service - is something you will continue to see grow. Globally, banks are realizing now that the ATM channel is not a replacement channel to the branch, but a complementary channel. I think that's important."
If you build it …
Self-service technology has been around for a while, but financial institutions haven't embraced it. Why? Because users, especially in the United States, weren't ready for it, said Glen Fossella, marketing vice president of Source Technologies.
FIs now realize, however, that if they offer more self-service solutions, consumers will use it.
"Customers want to use self-service anywhere it makes sense, and banking is one of those places where it makes sense. I think the rules for teller-assisted self service is the same as it is for online or in the ATM space - it has to work every time - flawlessly, quickly - and it has to save consumers time."
Now that consumers are more accustomed to self-service technology, it won't take long for even the most hesitant FIs to catch on. Changes in the market already are evident, Wausau's Turner said. Credit unions, which tend to be more experimental, and some of the nation's largest FIs are in self-service roll-out mode.
Automated solutions, which are facilitated by channel integration, are nothing new - but because of the shift to a Windows operating system, said John Tyler, vice president of Wincor Nixdorf Banking USA.
Madhavi Mantha, a senior analyst with Boston-based consultancy Celent LLC, said 2006 is expected to be a year of new functionality and automation. "It all goes back to customer experience at the ATM. The ATM needs to be more intuitive. Until it's more intuitive, people won't use it for more than cash withdrawal."
