History of the Automatic Teller

Posted by michael on Friday July 23, 2004 @01:35AM from the pay-to-play dept.

XopherMV writes "The line was long and slow, and he became increasingly irritated as his lunch hour dribbled away. All at once, he had a flash of inspiration. 'Golly, all the teller does is cash checks, take deposits, answer questions like "What's my balance?" and transfer money between accounts,' recalls Wetzel, now 75 and still living in Dallas with his wife. 'Wow, I think we could build a machine that could do that!' And with a $4 million go-ahead from Docutel's parent company, that's exactly what he and his engineers did. Read more about the story of the ATM."

1 of 473 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Losing money... by pubjames · 2004-07-23 01:50 · Score: 0, Redundant

From the article:

What you might find truly surprising, however, is that as a rule, large banks actually lose money on these moneymakers

Oh, poor banks! They have to pay for cash machines and they don't profit from them!

The banks have to have cash machines, if they didn't then they would lose lots of customers to the banks that did have them.

So, if they are charging customers from other banks, that money is profit, since they would have to have the machines for their existing customers anyway.