STRATEGIC PARTNERS
Carreker-Antinori is doing its best to automate ATM deployment, with software that forecasts a machine's cash needs, helps keep it up and running and streamlines service runs.
January 7, 2002
If Carreker-Antinori has its way, there will be far fewer people involved in ATM deployment.
Having developed software that tells ATM deployers how much money to put into their machines and recently purchased software that helps keep ATMs up and running, Carreker-Antinori Inc. plans to use technology to reduce another of the deployer's biggest and most expensive hassles: transporting cash.
The Dallas-based company, a maker of check processing software for 20 years, first got into the ATM business with its CashForecaster product. The software helped financial institutions solve a problem they'd never had prior to a 1995 Federal Reserve ruling: too much cash. Prior to the Fed's decision to reduce its reserve requirements, most banks kept their vaults, branches and ATMs packed with money.
"They'd never been charged for the cost of cash before so there had never been a concerted effort to reduce it," explained Wyn Lewis, Carreker Antinori's vice chairman.
Originally designed just for bank branches, the company created a version of the CashForecaster for ATMs at the request of several clients. The software analyzes historical activity and more recent activity to predict an ATM's cash needs.
According to Lewis, Carreker-Antinori's ATM CashForecaster clients have realized overall cash reductions of more than 30 percent.
Carreker-Antinori then expanded its ATM business with a fault management component.
"When we were in the back office of a large bank installing the CashForecaster, right next to us was the system they were using for fault management," Lewis said. "In many cases, the vendors were the same. Those who were doing first and second-line service also were delivering the cash."
Noting that competing fault management systems had remained relatively unchanged for the last decade or so, Lewis said his company wanted its software to be highly flexible and "open with a capital 'O' "
That's a necessity in the '90s, Lewis added, with financial institutions of all sizes making the move toward an Internet-based business model. "I think proprietary products are dead in the water," he said.
According to Jim McHale, managing director of Carreker-Antinori's Revenue Enhancement Division, the company's ATM Management System offers several distinct advantages over its competitors.
One of them is its ability to manage individual ATMs as opposed to ATM sites. "If a bank has two ATMs at one site and one goes down, they can still manage the remaining machine and choose to leave the other one down until the next scheduled service run," McHale said.
The AMS also can manage an ATM in a "wounded state," allowing it to dispense cash but not stamps, for example.
McHale joined Carreker-Antinori about a year ago, when the company decided to expand its services to include cash transportation consulting. McHale formerly headed up the McHale Group consultancy.
Banks, under pressure to reduce operating costs, are squeezing their armored car carriers, McHale said. "There has been some cost reduction, but also a loss of service quality and a tremendous erosion in vendors' profit margins."
By adding a CashOptimization module and transportation consulting services to its software suite, Carreker-Antinori hopes to assist deployers in designing optimal delivery routes and service schedules.
One way of doing that may be consolidating armored car runs. According to McHale, an armored car company can fill, on average, 1.7 ATMs an hour. Only about 10 minutes is required for the actual loading; the rest is drive time.
Consolidating runs would offer the armored car companies more density, McHale explained. "We can take some of the cost out without hurting the vendors."
With all of these automated systems, vendors and deployers were typically contacted via email or fax in what Lewis calls "an incredibly manual environment." Carreker-Antinori wanted to offer its customers an improved communications interface.
To that end, the company recently purchased Automated Integration Solutions Inc., a Toronto-based developer of ATM maintenance software. The Canadian company owns a patent related to a process that integrates voice technology and software to automatically dispatch service teams to an ATM.
In addition to this advanced dispatch and tracking software, AIS has built gateways to facilitate electronic business-to-business transactions between banks and service providers for such services as ATM repairs, cash replenishment, EDI billing and balancing and reconciliation.
"AIS has gone a long way toward developing this connectivity," said Brian Evetts, managing principal of Carreker-Antinori's Liquidity Management Group. "Electronic interfaces to service providers are something we believe that all financial institutions, ATM drivers and owners are looking to achieve."
Carreker-Antinori has incorporated the Internet-based, business-to business communications software designed by AIS to create a new product called eiService.com. According to Evetts, it's designed to "improve the management of all components of the ATM service delivery chain."
That includes automating the balancing function, providing electronic billing, forecasting cash needs, optimizing delivery routes and managing the ATM service providers.
"By utilizing advanced computer-to-computer interfacing software, we can eliminate the human component in most of these business transactions, ultimately reducing costs, improving accuracy and quality and designing new services," said Bjorn Larsen, managing principal of Carreker-Antinori and former president of AIS.
Not surprisingly, ISOs have expressed interest in the company's highly automated -- and thus more cost effective -- approach. While Carreker Antinori counts more than 150 banks around the world among its customers, Lewis said the "wildly enthusiastic" response of several large ISOs convinced them that their product would appeal to a more diverse group of deployers.
"Unlike financial institutions, ISOs do not have the money to throw people at their problems," McHale said. "They want a technology solution for their ATM issues."
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