Archive for October 2009

In tough times, refurbished ATMs get a look

Monday, October 19th, 2009

When deciding to install an ATM, the biggest expense usually is the cost of the machine itself. They’re cheaper than ever, but still run $2,000 to $3,000 — or even more for top-end models.

So it’s no surprise that buyers are interested in refurbished ATMs. They cost less than new machines — and it’s good for the environment, too.

The cost savings can be substantial — as little as half the price of a similarly configured new machine, though a 40 percent savings is a good rule of thumb.

But not every refurbishment is the same. The quality and extent of the work depends on the skill of the technician performing it. Don’t just look for the lowest price; look for a company with a competent service department, and get details on exactly what they do with the machine. Make sure all the components get inspected for signs of wear. And make sure the machine gets thoroughly tested after it’s been worked on.

It’s also a good idea to buy from a company that will stand behind its products after you buy it. If they aren’t willing to install and service the machine, that’s a warning sign that you might be buying a lemon.

In addition, refurbishment offers both opportunity and cautions when it comes to rapidly changing technology.

The caution: Make sure you’re not buying an obsolete machine that will need to be upgraded or replaced in a few years. Making sure an old machine is working doesn’t give it a color screen, a fast processor, a modern operating system or up-to-date encryption. Be sure the machine you’re buying will meet your needs and industry standards for years to come.

The opportunity: Since refurbishing a machine involves taking it apart anyway, upgrades can be added for relatively little extra cash. It’s easy, for instance, to install a color monitor, new printer, faster processor or more advanced card reader, or make the machine wireless or Internet ready. Machines can also be painted or wrapped. Don’t be afraid to ask the refurbisher about adding features you want.

ATM Network occasionally acquires used machines. When we do, our experienced technicians restore them to like-new status. Our refurbished ATMs come with the same service agreement as our new machines; that’s how confident we are in our refurbishment process.

Bring us your used machine to refurbish, or ask if we have any in stock. Even if we don’t have one, we might be able to find one for you. We’ll get it, restore it, deliver it, install it and service it afterwards. It’s yet one more reason why ATM Network is the best partner you can have in the ATM business.

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ATM maintenance tips

Friday, October 16th, 2009

prepping

Cash machines are fairly rugged devices. And other than the initial cost of buying one, they’re basically free to operate — the only expenses being receipt paper and the time it takes to keep them loaded with cash. Once the machine is paid off, the income from it is almost pure profit.

But it’s still a machine. And if you neglect it, it will require repair or replacement sooner than it would otherwise.

With that in mind, here are five easy maintenance tips for keeping your ATM working and profitable for years to come.

1. Keep it clean. Not only does cleaning help keep the machine running, but a clean machine is more attractive to customers as well. Use a damp (not soaking) cloth to wipe down the exterior and screen and clean grime off the keypad. Use canned air to blow dust off of sensors and other parts that are fragile or hard to reach. Clean the inside, too.

2. Consider the power supply. Frequent power surges can drastically shorten the life of your machine. Surges are much more common when a power line is shared with other large machines, such as food coolers or air conditioners. They can also be caused by storms or problems with your local power grid. Avoid putting your ATM on the same line as a major appliance, and buy an inexpensive surge protector for your ATM to plug into.

3. Keep it on. As with any computer, constantly turning an ATM on and off wears it out more quickly than just leaving it on. ATMs are designed to be left on, and there isn’t much difference in power consumption between an idle ATM and one that is turned off.

4. Be gentle. ATMs are built to withstand a lot of abuse, but being careful with interior parts reduces wear and tear. Don’t yank the cash box out, or jerk it out at an angle: that can break the clips and tracks that hold it in place. When removing receipt paper from the printer, gently guide it through rather than ripping it out. Ripping can throw off the paper feeder’s alignment, causing printing problems.

5. Get a periodic checkup. ATMs don’t really need much in the way of preventive maintenance. But it doesn’t hurt to have a technician give the machine a once over every now and then. They can check the dispenser for signs of wear, clean the rollers and clear dust and grime out of the mechanisms. They can check through the error logs to spot problems, and fix them before they lead to the machine being down. Whether this step makes sense for you depends on your situation. For a low-traffic machine, it’s neither necessary nor worth it. But for a high-traffic site — where the machine gets a lot of use, and even a day of downtime means significant loss of revenue — regular checkups can pay dividends.

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Friday Fun: When four languages aren’t enough

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Depending on where you live, ATMs in your community might have some interesting language options. Most machines have a Spanish option, of course, and quite a few also can be set to display other default languages like French.

But in some places, ATMs have more exotic choices.

Here in Minnesota, we have a large Hmong population. It’s a legacy of the Vietnam War, where many Hmong fought on the American side in Laos and then faced retribution after the war ended. Tens of thousands came here as refugees, and Minneapolis is now home to one of the largest Hmong communities in the United States.

Hmoob

Which means Minnesotans occasionally encounter machines like this. “Hmoob”, it turns out, is a variant spelling of Hmong. You can dig through the complex linguistic reasons yourself, but it’s basically an effort to represent a tonal language (where the pitch used to pronounce a word changes the meaning of the word) in English. So it’s spelled “Hmoob”, but pronounced “Hmong.”

Then, of course, there are the ATMs in London that speak Cockney rhyming slang.

But the real winner comes out of Africa, where it’s not uncommon to encounter a bewildering variety of national and tribal languages, not to mention choices catering to tourists. Take this South African machine, for instance. South Africa has 11 official languages, and this machine offers eight of them, including Afrikaans, English, SeSotho and isiZulu.

african_atm

Read the comments on the link for examples of other multiple-language machines in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. Machines in the Dutch half of St. Martin, for example, not only offer multiple languages — they can give you your cash in dollars, euros or Dutch guilders.

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ecoATM pays you for old electronics

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

eco-atm

The problem: A mountain of obsolete electronic devices, many containing hazardous compounds. The Environmental Protection Agency notes that 140 million cell phones were sold in the US in 2007 — and only 10% of those will end up being recycled.

To address that problem — and prepare for federal laws that require electronics merchants to accept old devices for recycling — A new company called ecoATM has begun deploying an an ATM-like machine.

The process is simple: a customer feeds the machine an old mobile phone and it analyses the device and assigns it a value. If the phone has a resale value, the customer receives store credit, or can donate the amount to charity. If there’s no resale value, customers can choose to have the handset recycled.

Although it currently only takes mobile phones, ecoATM will soon be able to accept a range of consumer electronics including MP3 players, digital cameras and even computers and printers.

The first ecoATM was installed at Nebraska Furniture Mart in Omaha. But the company is working with other large retailers, and says it will soon have machines in San Diego, Boston, Dallas and Seattle.

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Kiosk transactions expected to hit $775 billion

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

ATMs helped break open the “kiosk” industry in the 1970s and 1980s by providing banking services through a machine rather than a human teller.

Today, kiosks are popping up everywhere — and the trend appears to be accelerating, not slowing down.

Bryon Wiebold does self-checkout at the supermarket, self-check-in at the airport and self-banking at ATMs.

And last year, when the 43-year-old McKinney resident discovered self-service DVD rentals for $1 at Redbox kiosks, he was all over that, too.

“Anything I can automate, I do for the sake of time,” Wiebold said. “It’s not that I want people totally eliminated, but I appreciate the option if I’m in a hurry or in a bad mood.”

Do-it-yourself customer service continues to creep into everyday life via kiosks, smart-phone applications and the Internet. Consumers are using touch-screens everywhere from supermarket delis to hospital check-in stations. There are even machines that give vision exams and scan feet to produce custom insoles.

Kiosk transactions are expected to surpass $775 billion this year, up from $607 billion in 2008, according to IHL Group, which tracks the self-service industry. The total could hit $1.6 trillion by 2013.

Today you can rent movies, buy food, order dinner, recycle electronics, buy books, print out airplane boarding passes, shop and do any number of other things at kiosks.

As people become more and more comfortable with buying things and handling business through self-service machines, ATMs are becoming more powerful and flexible, blurring the line between traditional ATMs and full-service kiosks.

It’s not hard to see a convergence coming, where ATMs turn into multi-functional self-service centers that customers seek out as a way to save time and money while controlling every aspect of the transaction. The successful merchant will be the one who anticipates how to affordably harness that power in a way their customers want.

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Tech Tales: The Case of the Missing Surcharge

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Editor’s note: ATM Network technicians are so experienced that they routinely uncover and solve problems that the manufacturers themselves missed. This is the story of one such incident.

A few years back, a major ATM manufacturer introduced a machine that offered lots of great features — big screen, modern operating system, reliable mechanisms and lots of expandibility. But its software lagged behind, making the machines run sluggishly.

So with great fanfare, the company released a software upgrade that turned the laggard into a blazing-fast wonder. Customers clamored for them, and ATM Network began installing them by the truckload.

But we quickly encountered a problem. Cash withdrawals worked fine, but every time a customer performed a balance inquiry, the machine would shut itself down for 15-18 seconds, disrupting transactions.

Our troubleshooting team got involved. After some testing, they discovered that during those 15-18 seconds the ATM was resetting itself by downloading fresh surcharge information and encryption keys from our transaction processing server. That was a normal function, but one that rarely occurred — it was only necessary when there was a discrepancy between the ATM’s settings and the server settings. In this case, however, the settings weren’t changing on either end, so there was no reason for the resets.

The manufacturer didn’t know what the problem was. So our team began asking questions. Were there programming errors in the software code? Had the software upgrade made any changes to how settings were stored? Were there new settings that the transaction server wasn’t reading correctly? The answers came back: no, no, no.

The team finally decided to focus on the odd fact that the problem only cropped up during balance inquiries. From the ATM’s perspective, the main difference between a balance inquiry and a cash withdrawal is the surcharge: balance inquiries are free, withdrawals generally are not. Maybe there was a problem with how the machine decided which transactions had a surcharge and which ones didn’t.

Programmers use something called a “flag” to determine status settings. A transaction that has a surcharge would have its surcharge flag set to “on”, meaning a surcharge is assessed. A balance inquiry has its surcharge flag set to “off”, meaning it’s free.

But as the team dug through the system, they discovered that this machine did things a little differently: the surcharge flag was always set to “true”; all it did for free transactions was set the surcharge amount to $0.

That was odd, but seemed harmless. The effect was still the same: withdrawals had a surcharge, balance inquiries didn’t.

The team did some more digging, with engineers from the manufacturer on the phone to help. Together they soon discovered the problem. Besides checking its own settings, the ATM also verified its settings with the transaction server. But the transaction server had only one surcharge amount listed — the surcharge levied for cash withdrawals. This made sense, because if the ATM used the surcharge flag properly, then the only time a surcharge would be triggered was during a cash withdrawal.

But in this case, the ATM was triggering a surcharge on balance inquiries, too. And that $0 surcharge didn’t match the surcharge information on the server. So the ATM assumed its settings needed updating, and took itself out of service while it downloaded new settings from the server.

Thanks to the combined efforts of ATM Network and the manufacturer, the manufacturer wrote and released a software patch fixing the problem.

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NCR nears completion of Ohio plant

Monday, October 12th, 2009

NCR Corp. is nearly done with a whirlwind, four-month remodeling of a former battery factory in Columbus, Georgia, turning it into a state-of-the-art ATM manufacturing facility that may eventually employ 870 people.

The Panasonic factory, about two decades old, had been shuttered for two years. NCR knocked out walls, installed brighter lighting and dug 30 inches through the floor into the red Georgia clay to put a floor-level power conveyor in place for the first assembly line.

At the same time, hiring of administrative and production employees quickly began. To date, the company has about 125 people on its payroll in Columbus. Plans are to reach 150 by the time it rolls the first automated teller machine bound for a paying customer off of its production line in less than three weeks.

The Columbus facility was part of the agreement NCR made in June when it accepted $60 million in incentives to move its headquarters from Dayton, Ohio, to Duluth, Georgia.

The first ATM is expected to roll off the new plant’s assembly line in about four weeks.

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NCR CFO resigns amid takeover rumors

Friday, October 9th, 2009

NCR Corp., a maker of bank ATM machines, announced yesterday that their chief financial officer, Anthony Massetti, was leaving to join communications provider Avaya. NCR stock tumbled $1.72, or 12.6%, to close at $11.82.

Today, NCR’s stock is up on rumors that it might be taken over. For now it’s just that: rumors. Especially because it’s unclear who might be interested in buying the company.

Update: A Bloomberg story quotes analysts calling the rumor unsubstantiated, with one stating the obvious: yesterday’s drop in the stock price was probably an overreaction, so today the price is quite naturally bouncing back a little.

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Deposit-only ATM helps cash-income workers

Friday, October 9th, 2009

The POWR bar-top deposit-only kiosk.

Out in Portland, Oregon, a bartender saw a need and came up with a novel solution: a deposit-only ATM.

We all know we can use the automated teller machine to get cash out. But, now a Portland company has come up with a reverse ATM. Cash-in only. No withdrawals.

It’s designed for day labors to taxi drivers to hair stylists and more. Nearly 50 million people are what’s called “un-banked” or “under banked” people, earning $1 trillion a year in wages.

The idea came from Doug Lindstrom, a bartender at the 21st Avenue Bar & Grill in Portland.

On the surface, the POWR — for Point of Wealth Register — looks like an ordinary ATM. Lindstrom thought there’s got to be a better way for those with lots of cash at the end of their shift to save it.

Kamala Taylor-Cline is a server at 21st Avenue Bar & Grill. She’s happy the machine will be the first one installed where she works.

“Getting out at three in the morning it’s quite a concern leaving with cash,” she said.

Those using the machine log-in then direct to which account to deposit the cash.

Deposits can be made to a checking or savings account, or pay the electric or cable bill. Money can be added to pre-paid debit cards or donate to a local charity.

Accounts can even be set up to add money to IRA’s. Each transaction cost between $1 and $2.

Lindstrom spent $125,000 developing the machine and building three prototypes, and is now CEO of Point of Wealth Systems. He plans to use Portland as a 200-machine test market while seeking $5 million in venture capital to fund a total of 1,750 machines nationwide.

And the first installed machine? It’ll be going into the 21st Avenue Bar and Grill in a couple of months.

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Friday fun: Now that’s secure

Friday, October 9th, 2009

To make a withdrawal, please solve for x:

Worried about ATM security? Compared to this method, PIN numbers are leaky screen doors. Though you could still be ripped off by any mathematics professor or rocket scientist who happens by….

(For the curious: the equation is unsolvable without more information, because it contains at least two variables (z and n) for which there’s no way to derive a value. Two other symbols (Pi and Phi) might look like variables, but actually are Greek letters representing specific values: Pi and the Golden Ratio).

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