The ATM business competes in the marketplace for prime locations, customer foot traffic, payments' market share, cost efficiencies in the cash cycle, branding recognition and transaction revenue.
At the same time, the industry is dealing with such threats as fraud, over-zealous regulators, falling interchange and restrictions on surcharging.
There's also competition between different ATM business models, whether bank models or independent deployer models suited for the off-premise ATM market. Add into the mix the competition between new technologies, in particular a proliferation of customer-owned services which can be used for payment transactions and the established self-service banking terminals like ATMs.
Such intense competition, on so many different levels, can either inspire a race to the top with deployers continuing to improve ATM performance relative to one another in order to stay out in front or a race to the bottom in which mediocrity is tolerated as deployers try desperately to hold on to shrinking margins in maturing markets.
Enter ATM benchmarking. Benchmarking is a proven business instrument for gaining competitive advantage and for effecting organizational improvements on a systematic basis.
Right now, it's a very challenging time for ATMs with the end-of-support for Windows XP operating systems coming up in April and the complex U.S. migration to EMV lying ahead.
What support is available to credit unions for these times? ATMIA has a Windows 7 migration committee helping the industry worldwide prepare for this upcoming migration of its ATM operating systems and to look ahead at how to synchronize hardware and software cycles ahead of the 2020 end-of-support for Windows 7.
For credit unions, ATMs will remain a very interesting channel. For example, ATM advertising has proven to be significantly more effective than other forms of advertising. According to the NCR Corp., ATM adverts are 65% less expensive and 200% more effective than direct mail.
The approaching changes to ATM hardware and software, leading to a whole new operating system and chip-enabled services, might be an occasion to review ATM channel strategy and deploy value-added services that would otherwise have not been considered with older configurations.
Mike Lee is CEO of the ATM Industry Association. He can be reached at 6+27-21-9750752 or [email protected].
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