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History of the Automatic Teller
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."
There is even one, for some reason, at the McMurdo Station on Antarctica.
I would hate to be the armored truck driver responsible for keeping that one filled.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
that I can get a transaction receipt from a Diebold ATM, but not from a Diebolt voting machine.
Je n'ai pas d'avenir Je n'ai qu'un destin Celui de n'être qu'un souvenir C'est pour demain
Think of all the people that invention has helped out in a bind...
Politicians when they need money for their hookers, no more personal checks.
When all those dirty old men run out of money at the strip club they can hit the atm
And, me when I need bar money late at night (I won't take a credit card cause then there goes the bank)
Evolution or ID?
Actor. Actor. Actor. Actor. Actor. Actor. Actor. Jock. Actor. Actor. Jock. Actor. Actor. Jock.
I've heard they have a busniessman once in a while, but only the billionaire figurehead type.
Think they'd ever do a biography of the guy who invented one of best convenience devices ever created? No. I guess that's boring compared to Dubiously-Talented-Generic-Actress-Bint fretting over how hard it is to find a good sitter for her children's cat as they go on vacation to the South of France.
And people wonder why I'm a misanthrope.
--- Ban humanity.
ATM's are certainly great for when you need quick access to cash, particularly when you're travelling abroad, but an even better development has been the debit card. I find that I hardly ever carry cash anymore, as the debit card is not only convenient (no change jingling in your pocket), but also makes tracking much easier if you use something like Quicken or Money.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
It's a fantastic invention, indeed...
But it'll be much, much cooler when I can snag $10 or $15 or $75 out of the machine. Why do we get only 20s?
Sony ha
...we're willing to pay for those quickie stops at the ATM with often usurious fees--usually about $1.50 each time..."
Those fees drive me nuts. When I was in college, using the ATM would add $2.50 surcharge. When I studied abroad in Japan, there was a single ATM that I could use in all of Nagoya. The downtown Citibank had an ATM that would only charge me $1.00 for every transaction. That's right - it cost me $2.50 to use a machine just a mile from my bank, but only $1.00 to use a machine on the other side of the frickin' world.
coughcoughscamcoughcough
Now I use a credit union and only use credit union ATMs. No fees.
From the article:
The success of the ATM inspired similar innovations (some more frustrating than others) in a number of nonfinancial industries as well. Full-service gas stations have all but given way to credit card-primed gas pumps. Delta Air Lines has 846 do-it-yourself check-in terminals in 83 U.S. cities. Kroger has self-check-out lanes in more than 1,400 supermarkets. And you can find similar aisles in 850 Home Depot stores.
Pay-at-the-pump stations are so convenient I will not use a traditional pay-inside gas pump unless absolutely necessary, even if it means going a bit out of my way. The self-service check-in option at the airport is a $DEITYsend, too: not checking any bags? Why muck around behind people who have never before seen the inside of an airport? Identify yourself to the kiosk with a credit card or frequent flyer card, get the boarding pass and go.
I find the self-serve lanes at store rather less useful, but am amazed at how quickly the ATM model has become both widespread and nearly indispensable.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
In the (relatively) early days of ATMs a couple of crooks bought a machine, built a nice-looking case around it, and rolled it into a shopping mall. They programmed it to report that "your transaction could not be completed--please try again later." Of course, it wasn't connected to anything--except a recorder that was logging all the ATM card numbers and the customer-entered PINs. The crooks came back, rolled away the ATM, and drained the bank accounts of the poor folks who tried to use the machine.
Uh, no kidding? Guess what -- tellers cost them money too!
Obviously, banks make their money on 1) lending out deposits and 2) account fees. Everything else is just designed to get money into the vault, and ATMs are a vastly cheaper way of supporting customers than branches and tellers.
Actually, it's probably just lending out deposited money that's their real business. My impression is that the account fees function more to weed out unprofitable customers than to make money in their own right.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
A tip for /. readers driving in the UK: only stop at Moto service stations when using the motorway network. They use free ATMs; most of the others have signed up with the fee-charging vampires.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Here in the middle of the Netherlands, ATM and their bastard offspring have become an issue. Oh, they work nicely enough, do what they are supposed to do and of course we got the random bulgarian fuckwits who attach magnetic card readers, so our ATMs work just like any other ATM. The problem is the fact that banks use ATMs as a cheap means to close down local establishments. Instead of talking to a human person, banks now give us two ATMs to withdraw money, another specialized ATM-like thingy to deposit money and a big sticker with an URL on it to their online banking site. ( Which, if I may add, works perfectly with Mozilla. Go ABN-Amro! *ahem* )
For daily stuff this isn't much of an issue and the town where I live in is considered large enough ( 100k+ ) for banks to have permanent establishments, but what about smaller towns? Because this is the middle of nowhere, there are plenty of towns without bank establishments, where it was cheaper for the bank to put an ATM or two in place, promote online banking and telling people to go fuck themselves. Even though for daily use ATM suffice, how about non-daily things? Stuff like opening new accounts, information, major transactions*, mortages and supplemental financial services?
Mind you, this is the Netherlands. Almost no one here has creditcards and instead most of us pay directly from our bank accounts using our bank's card with our PIN. Think of it as an ATM which pays your purchases, comparable to a debit card.
* ) This means anything about EUR 1500 because of the default limit of EUR 1500 max withdrawal per day. Basically, we've got three options if we want to buy something EUR 1500+; use the ATM once a day for several days, raise the limit at a bank establishment and withdraw money at said bank establishment. ( Limits dont apply for non-ATM withdrawals ) Of course, since most establishments have been closed and allot of people around here live in the middle of nowhere, options 2 and 3 aren't really valid unless you want to travel 25km in the hope of finding a local bank establishment. Try paying for a EUR 20k car that way.
Hate me!
Oh no... an entire article with thousands of threads dedicated to calling them ATM Machines. My nitpikc nerves are ready and waiting to have their seizure.
"The line was long and slow, and he became increasingly irritated as his lunch hour dribbled away."
So now, instead of waiting on a teller, we wait in a long line of people trying to get to the ATM with the person at the front repeatedly putting in his card while all the time muttering under his breath "I'm sure I had money in here!"
This is me. Don't like it? That's unlucky.
Sorry, this is going to come across a bit sexist, but it's an observation of mine that I think is true.
When women use cashpoints, they will often get out tiny amounts of money. Like, ten or twenty pounds. When men use them, they get out much bigger quantities, so they don't have to visit them so often.
I've had girlfriends that have driven me nuts getting out ten pounds, and then a few hours later having to hunt for a cashpoint so they can do it again.
Is this a valid observation or am I just a sexist?
Why is the hero of this story the chap in Dallas and not the guy in Enfield? Although his invention didn't have all the functionality of the moden machines it also allowed access to cash 24 hours a day, rather like cashing a cheque.
Would it be outrageous to supose that this spin might be because the inventor of the machine in Enfield was not American? Not that I would suggest Americans ever revise history...
So the bank "loses" $250/month on its own ATM. An entry-level teller making $10/hour will cost the bank over $1600/month in salary alone. If the bank didn't have an ATM in the doorway, the bank would need more tellers to handle the same volume of transactions. The bank should pay me for my ATM transactions for lowering their cost structure. (Instead they cut the number of free teller-assisted transactions to encourage you to go the machine.)
In the UK, ATMs that are part of the Link network are generally free to all participating banks. So, even though I'm a HSBC user, I can use HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds TSB, Halifax etc. ATMs for free. The only time you ever really need to pay to use ATMs is for the private ones in clubs and bars and for building societies.
funnily enough, that was exactly the same story that came to my mind. You would have though they would have got more than $3000 though
over here in the UK the machines tended to be built into brick walls (hence the expression "i'm just getting some cash from the hole in the wall")
this has led to enterprising thieves using a JCB to steal the whole damn thing netting a cool $140,000.
just goes to show, that like so much in life, the real money isn't in making something, it's in stealing someone elses.
I don't mind ATMs but one thing that does bug me is the progression to self-scan lanes in stores. It looks like a poor excuse to dump cashiers, and the systems are slower too. Four self-scan lanes seem to barely keep up with two cashiers, and still require intervention and supervision by at least one person. It seems like an effort to skimp on minimum wage work backfired, but still, I try to avoid going to stores that try to squeeze out another job by replacing it with bad service and an insulting and tedious self-scan system.
One of them involved the two rival implementations, both with fairly large followings of engineers: there first one involved the card contained a unique ID that was keyed to a central database, requiring every ATM to be connected to the database in order to authorise connections. This is the one we use today.
The second one involved having all the necessary information, such as the account balance, stored directly on the card. This meant that an ATM could authorise a transaction instantly without needing to communicate with the base. This was popular because it was faster, cheaper, much simpler, and allowed all kinds of nice features like mobile ATMs.
Apparently there were quite a lot of engineers and other managers who didn't understand why having all this information on the card was a bad idea...
So, if you ever use an ATM in the UK, remember my Uncle Ron, who managed to persuade the people in charge that the more expensive, more complex system was in fact the right way to go!
Years ago, I worked for a company that serviced ATM's. We did service for Docutel, Mosler, and a couple of others. Part of my job was handling the software bug reports, passing them back to the proper companies. The ones for the ATM's were always the most interesting.
In the late 70's, for example, one of the vendors had to supply a patch for ATM's installed in Illinois because customers could use an ATM at any bank branch. It seems that Illinois had a law at the time that only allowed customers to bank at the office where they had their account! Sort of defeats the whole idea.
There were numerous instances of bugs where the machine would seem to capture a card for one reason or another, but then spit it out to the next customer.
The trickiest part of the ATM mechanism was the bill dispenser. It had all kinds of sensors to make sure one and ONLY one bill was passed through at a time. For gross adjustments, they used fake money that was the right size, but regular paper. For the final adjustments, they kept several hundred dollars in real $10 and $20 bills in a big safe on the premises. The money had to be replaced every few days. The early machines couldn't handle old, wrinkled cash.
One of the things I did learn was that the security was pretty good, but only as good as we made it. We used to have card programming machines laying around our warehouse. They had locks and keys, but of course the keys were always in the locks.
I would hope they've finally recognized the problem and fixed it now, but I haven't checked recently. Actually I would be very surprised if at some point this wasn't discovered by not-so-friendly people, forcing them to address the issue, but this would be the kind of suppressed stuff you wouldn't find in their press releases.
In Sardegna (Italy) a gang of robbers has specialized in robbing ATM's (in Italy they're better known as Bancomat, yest just like bank-o-mat). They use a front-end loader and a truck (both stolen of course), they use the front-end loader to (literally) rip the ATM out of the building and to load it on the truck. They have seized five ATM's this year. The last time it took them ten minutes to do the job - they obviously triggered the alarm but when the police got there they were gone. And yes, the ATM's are rigged with a paint charge that's supposed to make the money useless... unless they know the right way to open the safe (apparently the alarm itself doesn't trigger the charge) - if they did it right, the last job paid 35,000 Euros (about $ 42,000)
N P/ MNU01/A02.html
Newspaper article (in Italian) here:
http://www.unionesarda.it/UNIONE/2004/NZ3005/CR
In the long run we are all dead. - John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946)
The supermarket across from our offices (UK) recently replaced two cashier positions with 6 self scan positions. They have one cashier attending these 6, not to take money but just to help people, and the volume of people that go through them is fantastic. When I pop in for lunch, I have the option of waiting in line for a cashier, or go through a self scan. The self scan positions always seem to be busy, but you never seem to have to wait for one to free up, they are that much quicker, and the transaction is faster as well.
:)
I got to speak to the technician who services them a few weeks back, and he said each position on average dealt with 150% more traffic during a day than the cashier it replaced. They are doing so well, he said they are looking at putting in more positions. Oh, and they run on WindowsNT4
From my own peculiar experience, the bank machine appears to be in decline. I lived in Canada for the first 10 or 15 years of bank machines. They were great. I did all my banking through them. By law, my own bank couldn't charge me to use it.
(The gov reasoned that since the banks were laying off all the tellers, they couldn't then charge customers to use the machines when the machines were saving the banks money, logically enough. And later, through the 90s, when the banks were selling off prime real estate in city centre's, which bank machines had made redundant, it seemed even less justifiable to charge customers.)
In the late 90s, I moved to the UK and realized
a) I had taken bank machines for granted (I hadn't even been to a bank since I was a kid!),
b) there weren't very many bank machines around,
c) making deposits was no longer possible, and
d) I was either going to walk miles and miles or pay a fee.
So it was a shock. To make matters worse, it seemed there were more generic "ATM" machines which charged £1.50 ($2.77US), than branded machines which could conceivably be free.
I mentioned this to a relative in Canada, who complained that the same thing was happening there. It seems that the banks have got around the charging restrictions in many countries by forming a kind of 3rd party consortium to provide generic "ATM" machines. Once established, the banks can then phase out the free machines, and ensure that everybody pays for every single transaction.
It's inconceivable that the banks could lose money from bank machines. No real estate, no buildings, no employees... how does one lose money? It's like claiming that electronic distrubution costs more than shipping physical product.
In any case, I think bank machines are in decline. There are fewer of them. The charges are rising. Rather than using a machine a few times a day, we now use it once once every two weeks, and then stuff the money under the mattress. That's not progress. In fact, one might be tempted to go back to using a teller and avoiding the charges - but of course, you'd need to find an actual, physical bank with actual, physical tellers.
Is this generic ATM scheme kicking in all over the world?
Is anyone doing anything to stop it?
Barclay
I actually know Don Wetzel and his life would probably be very interesting to read about by both engineers and others. The other things he has done in life would amaze you (he didn't just invent the ATM). He is also very kind and generous. One interesting fact is that he has 40 grandchildren (actually I think it may be 41 now).
Now if he would only teach me the maintence code to the machine so I can make it think the $20's are $1's...
Check it out: Why Cryptosystems Fail
At one of the local stores, they have machines that have scales to make sure you don't try to steal anything... and what inevitably happens is that if you scan something and do not place it in the bag quickly enough, the damn machine ends up in an infinite loop of "Put the item in the bag!" and "Take the item out of the bag and rescan it!" until either the cashier intervenes, or I kick the machine and it shuts up... not to mention that at any moment, at least one of the machines has crashed.
From what I remember of the Seattle Underground tour, there were (nearly) 24/7 "ATMs" running in Seattle in the 1900's.
Specifically, there were booths dotted around the place which had tellers sitting in them. Same exact idea, but without the "A" part of "ATM".
Coming soon - pyrogyra
Like those new self-checkout cash registers, ATMs gained popularity because they saved the banks money. They didn't have to hire as many employees or open as many branches, which was a great cost-saving measure.
The difference between the self-checkout cash registers and ATMs is that ATMs are generally much more convenient and quicker to use.
Those self-checkout things are absolutely horrible. It would be one thing if you simply had to scan it and throw it in the bag, paying at the end. But no, it can't be that simple! You have to constantly mess around with the screen, constantly adding and removing items from the bagging area, and the stupid machine is getting pissed off with you for putting the wrong item in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not to mention the things often can't figure out how to handle certain items, so you have to wait for an employee to help you. Waiting in line for a cashier is almost always much faster and easier. The stupid machines are just popular because the company saves money by not having to hire as many employees.
Get a clue, companies! Either keep your employees or make your self-checkout machines quick and easy!
The ATM at my bank is so popular that it is actually faster to walk in, find a live teller and do your transaction than it is to sit outside in a line waiting for the ATM. Is that ironic? Depends on how you define irony.