ATMs

[Claude]

It was 50 years ago today that the world's first ATM was unveiled at a Barclays branch in Enfield, London.

[Rudi]

Wow... Older than I expected!

According to the video there are +/- 3 million ATM's worldwide.
I would have expected that number to be a little higher?? (Though 3M is a lot!!)

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[HansV]

I wouldn't have thought that the Summer of Love also brought us ATMs!

[NotQuite]

Wow... Older than I expected!

According to the video there are +/- 3 million ATM's worldwide.
I would have expected that number to be a little higher?? (Though 3M is a lot!!)

I would be quite surprised if the number is that low. Here on the lower left coast of Canada, we have ATM's at every bank branch, Credit Union, gas station, most bars, ALL casino's etc. I suspect the number here alone is well into 5 figures.

[HansV]

According to the World Bank, the world-wide number of ATMs per 100,000 adults was about 40 in 2015 (Automated teller machines (ATMs) (per 100,000 adults)). With a world population of about 7.5 billion, of which about 70% is adult, that would come out to 40 * 70% * 7,500,000,000 / 100,000 or a bit over 2 million. So 3 million now doesn't seem much too low.
The site in my link shows that the number of ATMs is still quite low in many parts of the world.

Also see ATM Machine Statistics. It mentions the number of 3 million worldwide.

[Argus]

In Sweden there are fewer ATMs now than some years ago. It seems many people are stubbornly determined to use their cards for just about every transaction; and those that don't (use their cards for just about every transaction) have to wait in the queue while they fiddle with their cards ...

So during a period some 5 years ago many ATMs were removed. It went so far in some rural areas that it became a question for the government. So we see new companies installing some ATMs around the country.

New for this year (2013) is that the county administrative boards can help a representative to offer payment services by applying for state grants from the National Post and Telecom Agency.

(According to some statistics (World Bank) from 2012 I found in a Swedish article we were ranked 71 of 166, not too bad ... with around 43 ATMs per 100,000, still among the lowest in EU, Canada had 204. Still, there are plenty of places with no banks or ATMs.) But hey, we're progressive, chips, mobile wallets and whatnot.

How common is it in your country with shops or a café/coffeehouse not taking cash?

The banks are definitely determined to stop handling cash; there are ATMs there as well. In fact they would be very happy if they didn't have to meet people at all. (Just paying an invoice, no cash involved, cost 150 SEK, £13.6/$17.4, that's around four times the cost some 10 years ago.)

Did I mention that we this year end the biggest change of coins & banknotes? They are OK, but the banks don't want to deal with them. The world has gone bonkers.
--
Edit: 1. Didn't read the whole article in Claude's link, I had seen the video earlier in the day, but just saw that Sweden was mentioned. 2. An article about ATMs mentioned that Sweden's first ATM was installed just 9 days later. That, on the other hand, is something I wouldn't have guessed.

[Claude]

BTW, whenever someone asks me if I knew where the nearest ATM machine was, I reply I don't remember, I don't even remember my PIN number, alas, most of them don't get it.

[HansV]

Since 2015, cash transactions comprise less than 50% of all payments in shops, cafes, restaurants etc. in The Netherlands. Paying even small amounts electronically is encouraged.
Contactless payments and paying with your phone are rapidly becoming more popular.

[Argus]

(From the link Hans posted.)

2017-06-28_ATMs.PNG

It seems like the Netherlands is following the Nordic countries, slightly below Denmark into the cashless utopia ...
That doesn't come as a surprise. (And we have all seen your inventions, Google wind, the self-driving bicycle etc. )

There is peak at 2011 in Sweden. (Here, earlier you couldn't pay small amounts electronically, or there was an extra fee; but that must have changed.)

We have the oldest central bank (that issued the first banknotes in Europe it is said), tradition and all that, as in several European countries (where the history comes from, according to Eddie Izzard ), now let's throw everything out with the bathwater, because electronic transactions are so safe.
There's no end to all that's supposedly wrong with coins and banknotes. They are bad for the environment, the risk of theft, they are dirty (ah yes, my great-grandfather died cause of dirty banknotes ) etc.

[steveh]

It was 50 years ago today that the world's first ATM was unveiled at a Barclays branch in Enfield, London.

Hi all

I remember the ad with Reg Varney (on the buses actor) as he was very popular it was in B/W but some of the things not mentioned in the article are

1. You had to first go to the bank and buy a prepaid token
2. The token were mildly infected with Carbon 14 as magnetic stripes had not been invented (another 5 years for that), so I figure that if you walked around London with a geiger counter you could probably figure out who was over 68 (in fact the inventor said you would neeed to eat 136,000 of the tokens to have any health affect)
3. You had to use a 6 digit pin (because the inventor could remember his 6 digit army number but his wife could only remember 4 so that is why we now have 4 digit pins)
4. The maximum the machine would release was 10 x £1 notes, quite a lot in 1967 for a weekend
5. UK Banks were onlyy open Monday to Friday from (If memory serves) 10:00 - 15:00 so prior to the cash machine local publican usually took a cheques for cash (knowing he was likely to get it all back!!)

[BobH]

In the US, the first machines only dispensed cash and were not connected to bank account data. I believe they were sold under the name Docutel. The company was run by Dandy Don Meredith's brother and ran on a lot of Dandy Don's professional football earnings.

[PJ_in_FL]

The forward-looking transition of the Diebold company from bigger and stronger bank safes to ATMs and electronic transaction security used to be a model of how a company can survive radical changes. They had the more people friendly and reliable machines that I recall, and were favored even after IBM came out with their own line. The IBM machines were more difficult to use and seemed to go down a lot. I believe that was the default for any issue, just shut down and call for help.

Unfortunately our local IBM CU branch had to use the IBM machine ...

[BobH]

Diebold did, indeed, transition to ATMs quite well but lost market share to NCR - another example of a company transforming itself to meet new market conditions. Now there are a number of machines made overseas that compete but I believe NCR dominates new machine deployments. There are now ATMs that make a dial-up connection instead of being run on leased lines and even machines that operate over the Internet. I used to support a fairly large ATM network with several hundred Diebold machines. We stuck with a single manufacturer to simplify things and Diebold was the best cost/function trade off when we got into the business. I've lost track of the industry over the last 15 or so years and do not know what the current market is like. I used to attend the ATM and credit card conferences.

I remember the IBM ATMs. I know of only one bank, personally, that deployed them. They drove them from the IBM CICS platform and there were some reliability problems with the terminals and the platform for more years than there should have been. The one bank I knew who went with IBM later pulled them all. Late in my career IBM did a lot to improve the reliability/availability of CICS but the early days were a very raw wound. IIRC IBM tied teller systems and ATMs together as package offerings.

[GeoffW]

Jordan has cardless iris recognition ATMs, which have been so successful that they have been used by the UNHCR to efficiently distribute aid to refugees in that country.

They haven't taken off elsewhere in the world, not because of technical constraints, but because the card and PIN system is cheap and acceptable. It's cheaper for banks to refund fraudulent transactions than to invest in a more secure technology.

[Argus]

I agree with your last comment, and it's good that technology can make it easier to distribute aid.

I'm not convinced that biometric data (be it fingerprints, iris scans, selfies etc.) (or behavioural patterns) is in good use as passwords. As "user names", in certain cases, yes. You can't change it, and it would be the same password everywhere.

Since some in this country are really determined to move us to a cashless society (hmmm, haven't we been there before) I assume all these scans etc. will happen in the shops.

Cashier 9000: I can't recognise and accept your iris scan.
Customer: What, oh, but I do really need this medicine.
Cashier 9000: I can accept a voice sample, please sing Mary Had a Little Lamb.
Customer: -
Cashier 9000: I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that, but thanks for the entertainment.

I'd rather see my computer being hacked than myself.

It is, again, a case of: it is the latest in tech, it can be done and thus it must be done, it seems.

[GeoffW]

Aid distribution in this way was able to get 98% of the money to the intended recipients. But it wasn't completely without problems. A sick mother couldn't send her child to do the shopping (payment at the store was also by iris scans).

Biometrics is being increasingly used in areas where it hasn't bee. Used before. US has been taking fingerprints at border entry for some years, although they don't even take passport numbers when departing (this is changing). In Australia entry is completely automatic, you don't talk with a person unless there's any question mark (face recognition isn't perfect). But I think there is a market for paying securely by phone at retail outlets. In Colombia, to pay by EFTPOS, I used to have to enter a PIN, sign a slip, and then show my passport. There's a market in employment applications, like time clocks. It is convenient if it is quick enough and not intrusive (singing a song would be regarded as intrusive)- and if there is a suitable backup procedure.

Passwords online without a password manager can be a real problem, and a password manager itself is perhaps vulnerable. There's so many sites with so many passwords. I frequently get locked out of sites. Then I have to come up with a new password which I am liable to forget the next time I use the site.

However, experience with people who use a system which has biometric as well as PIN/password is that most people would rather use a PIN than a password.

[Rudi]

Geoff.... good to see you back! Been a looooong time *mate*
Trust all is well.

[BobH]

Jordan has cardless iris recognition ATMs, which have been so successful that they have been used by the UNHCR to efficiently distribute aid to refugees in that country.

They haven't taken off elsewhere in the world, not because of technical constraints, but because the card and PIN system is cheap and acceptable. It's cheaper for banks to refund fraudulent transactions than to invest in a more secure technology.

We used to call the aversion to implementing new and better technology the 'curse of the installed base.' As I think I reported before, I worked in the credit card industry from the late sixties into the new millennium. In the very early years, there was not even a magnetic stripe placed on cards (because there were not yet that many ATMs in use). Imprinters - frequently called 'zip-zap' devices relied upon the embossed card number and other data. The cost of displacing imprinters delayed the use of mag strip reading terminals. Much later, when Europe went to the 'smart card' (with a chip), the US did not follow because there were so many mag stripe readers installed and banks didn't want to have to sell chip readers at a discount to merchants to replace the mag stripe readers. The international marks were 'absorbing fraud losses' which meant that no individual bank was held accountable unless collusion or very, very poor practices - in violation of agreements - was proved. It was not until the international marks' fraud losses became too high to sustain that they decreed the move to chip readers.

Now the US has largely adopted the chip reader - although that process is far from complete; mag stripes are still relied upon in many, many transactions - those readers will become the 'curse of the installed base' preventing biometrics usage. Thirty years ago, I participated in an 'iris scan' demonstration put on by NCR at an international trade show. For the years thereafter that I attended the shows, I'd stop by the NCR presentations where they were continuing to tout scanning among other newer products. I was correctly identified even over a period of years. While I know practically nothing about facial recognition, I do know that aging, injury and even plastic surgery can either fool it or make its probable error rise significantly; therefore, I would think that iris scans would be more reliable, generally speaking. I have no idea which technology is more cost effective, except to say that facial recognition can be more effective in crowds because the iris (or retina) scans cannot - as far as I am aware - be used effectively without a fairly narrow range of focus on the subject whereas facial recognition can be deployed with good result without requiring subjects to participate knowingly and directly.

[GeoffW]

Face scanning, is, as you point out, not reliable, although effective at a distance. It can be especially effective at casinos where people have been excluded from a venue.

Retinal scans have been around the longest time, but they are very intrusive and require the absolute cooperation of the subject.

Iris scans have developed to a point where people can be recognised from a distance. They are looking at the possibility of an iris plus facial scan for people exiting the US, especially at the Canadian border. At the moment, people arriving in the US have their photos and fingerprints taken, but people leaving have no details taken at all. Thus it is difficult to know how many people overstay visas. It's much easier for Australia to do this with no land based borders.

Iris scans have been incorporated into some cell phones, but they require an infra red light. This causes a problem with some people, even though the light is at a safe level.

Something comparatively new is the scanning of veins on the whites of the eyes. It can be done in ordinary light. There is an app out there which can be incorporated into any phone with a 1MB camera or better. They are using it for pesonal banking in a bank in Turkey- but my friend there tells me that people are so used to PINs, which are also faster, that it's very slow in getting acceptance.