An estimated 40 million households in the United States are “cash-preferred”, meaning they prefer to use cash for most of their financial transactions. They may not have a bank account, or the places they shop may not take credit cards, or they may use controlled cash withdrawals as a budget management tool.
It’s a growing market, too, thanks to urbanization and the country’s growing Hispanic population.
Which helps explain why ATM manufacturer Tranax Inc. is focusing a lot of attention on that area.
It’s the nature of self-service, and especially financial self-service,” said Wes Dunn, director of business development for California-based Tranax. “Absolutely, we realize that relevance and the opportunity for our ISOs and for retailers.”
Tranax on Aug. 19 focused on that opportunity in Dallas, where the company held a one-day seminar to drum up awareness among its distributors about self-service money-transfer, bill-payment and check-cashing solutions.
Money transfer is especially big:
One such application is money-transfer, which Tranax works with Nexxo Financial Corp. to provide. Nexxo’s Freddie Seba said the Northern California-based company caters primarily to the burgeoning Hispanic market in the United States, many members of which are unbanked and routinely send cash home to their families in Latin America.
Seba cited statistical evidence that Hispanics in America transfer money an average of 1.5 to 1.8 times per month, with the average transaction totaling $300. Nexxo, Seba says, processes as many as 2,000 transactions on some of its money-transfer kiosks, whose U.S. deployments number around 500, with locations throughout California, Arizona, Texas and Illinois.
Seba said money-transfer remittances are expected to grow to $100 billion through 2015, and Nexxo also offers bill-payment and mobile top-up as ancillary applications.
The company’s kiosks also provide check-cashing and bill-paying services.
It’s not all about speciality kiosks, either; Tranax has designed sidecars for its traditional ATMs so they can offer many of the same functions, as well as dispensing pre-paid cards and the like.
