Financial software maker NCR released a trio of announcements this morning pushing ATM innovation forward.
The Duluth, Ga.-based company is installing 2,200 advanced ATMs for the Bank of Montreal, which will allow faster transactions and “enhanced convenience, security and performance,” said Steven Nowaczyk, Head of North American ATM Channel, BMO Financial Group.
NCR is also activating its interactive teller system — a video teller platform — for the first time with North Shore Bank in Wisconsin. This functionality previously ran over FIs’ teller software, but is now a complete system served end-to-end by NCR — meaning that it’s scalable, and should be expected to show up at other NCR-served banks soon.
NCR also announced it will support bitcoin as a payment option on its cloud-based point-of-sale system, NCR Silver.
Former Fed chairman Paul Volcker once infamously said the only useful thing banks have invented in the last 20 years was the ATM. (This was a few years ago — he may have changed his tune.) However, ATMs these days little resemble their ancestors from prior decades, but still, the phrase “ATM innovation” is likely to bring jeers from innovation junkies. A European attendee at a Bank Innovation event said he had not used an ATM in several years.
But for better worse, ATMs (and cash) are here to stay, and actually, the stuff that’s going on in the space is pretty cool. Cardtronics offers digital rewards at its ATMs that can send offers to users’ smartphones. FIS has offered cardless cash withdrawals for more than a year, and ATMs are rolling out from FreeATM that waive fees if customers watch 10-second video ads. That’s good news when out-of-network ATM fees have never been higher — $4.35 per transaction, according to Bankrate.
This post was updated to correct information about the functionality from Cardtronics.