Slashdot Mirror
Super-ATMs Being Rolled Out
News.com has an article up looking at something I find interesting and somewhat confusing. The Vcom ATM is an attempt to make people's lives more convenient by adding unexpected functionality to the standard Teller Machine. Besides dispensing cash, new ATMs can fulfull the roles of PayPal (by sending money to people), bank (by cashing checks on the spot), and cellphone store (by selling Verizon services). From the article: "The Circle K and Exxon Mobil machines are far more basic than 7-Eleven's Vcoms, which have been called overengineered. Several dozen customers polled informally outside a 7-Eleven in Winter Springs, Fla., recently said that they had never used the Vcom inside, and one woman who said she did use it once to withdraw cash complained that it was 'confusing' and 'complicated,' and added that she would not use it again. 'There were just too many steps,' said the woman, Peggy Baker, who teaches French in Winter Springs. 'And the $1.75 transaction fee was too much--it was painful.' She said she was not interested in the other Vcom features, which require users to enroll and enter a Social Security number on a touch screen."
TFA
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If only they had it throw up a windows-like dialog box with "yes" or "no" they could get people to sign their live savings over to 7-11 very easily.
Sleep is futile.
Or is that too 'confusing' and 'complicated'?
ATMs are the MacDonalds of the banking world.
MacDonalds don't offer slow food.
Making an ATM offer slow services is not a good move; they just won't be used, in exactly the same way that very few people would buy a burger from MacDonalds if it took twenty minutes to cook.
enter a Social Security number on a touch screen.
A masked thief enters a convenience store. The cashier tells him to take whatever he wants, but is surprised when he opens the ATM, removes a hard disk drive, and runs up to the cashier. He shouts, "I own you!"
The cashier says, "No! I meant that you could take anything but me!"
Do you like German cars?
I don't see how they can be considered "super-ATMs". I'm from Portugal, which isn't a tech superpower, and in here the regular ATMs offer that kind of service since the early 90s.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Can they set them up to handle the voting booth tasks? It seems the same companies that make these reliable, traceable units, just can't figure out how to make a voting console properly. Merging the two could solve the USA's current problems with (apparantly) rigged elections.
As for this whole ATM idea that becomes a small store. Well, surely paying your bills through it is only for the poor (else you would just let your bank do it for free) who can only pay with cash. 1.75-3 dollars seems like the extra banks charge here if you want to pay a bill cash as the counter instead of through the mail from your account.
As for other services. Yeah great. Internet access through an ATM? Talk about a waste of hardware. You got a small bank vault, a complex teller machine sitting idle while somebody is browing goatse and 20 fuming customers behind him waiting to withdraw cash?
Couple that with the fact that an awfull lot of people are already confused enough by regular cash dispensers and this sounds like a really bad idea.
Then again what do I know. Maybe people said the same things about the original ATM's.
But 3 dollars for paying a bill. Yikes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've seen ATMs offer mobile phone top ups for quite a while, which is probably useful if you have a pre-pay mobile.
Anything else takes too long - when there's a queue you aren't going to live long if you start using slow specialist services.
I also happen to think that charging people to get access to their own money is a bit rich, but luckily I'm in the UK so all the standard bank and building society cash machines are free regardless of who you bank with. Going abroad is always a shock though, because we're used to withdrawing smaller amounts of money more frequently than large amounts of money infrequently.
Possibly the best single feature they rolled out was to make available ATM payments to just about any company wiling to sign up. The first adopters were the utilities companies, that because of this now have less offices and "point of sale" than needed 20 years ago. Today any company can become a client of SIBS and get a 5-number code to be its ID. This ID will be printed on invoices along with another number, which identifies the transaction. Anyone can use an ATM to pay the invoice. Just type in these 2 codes, the amount to be transfered and you're done. The receipt will be printed out and for some services (ie: mobile phone top-ups) you get to see the effect within a couple of seconds.
Building on this basic operation, many companies hired the services of SIBS to add their own menus and sub-menus on the ATMs, so these days there is a quite a lot of stuff you can do:
- buy concert tickets
- buy train tickets
- make bank transfers
- allow/change permissions for automatic payments from your account (ie: allow the water bill to be paid without confirmation)
- top up mobile phones
- pay public transport monthly tickets . this one had some extra work: the public transport tickets have to get in the ATM so their chip gets read/written. They're similar to London's Oyster cards
and so on. overall it's pretty cool and has been working for a while now, that's why I'm surprised that adding bank transfers to ATM operations (in the US?) makes the news onMind you, that would be the only thing banks provide free these days.
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
VCom machines make a fortune from people who normally do not hold bank accounts. The check cashing is ideal for people who work the swing shift and miss most of the check cashing joints an liquor stores.
.. as the game show used to say .. 'SURVEY SAYS' -> once again, nothing useful because the people surveying are just too dense to realize exactly who these things were designed to serve.
:)
Many people who don't have a bank account also pay their bills via western union, either a moneygram or purchasing money orders to mail off to someone , or drop in the rent box on the way home.
These people really don't give a rat's ass who gets their social security number, they hope whoever steals it manages to pay off their bills and fix their credit score.
They also don't care about the $1.75 fee, as most people who appreciate the machines don't in fact use the ATM feature.
Vcom cornered a market nobody else has been able to touch. There's a 7-11 in every blue collar neighborhood in most first , and third world countries and those things are popping up globally.
So
Rather swift marketing imho
Every time I go to my bank's ATM I withdraw $300. To do this, they make me hit "withdraw money", then hit "from checking", then present me with several pre-selected amount buttons all below $200 which makes me hit "other amount", then I hit 3-0-0-0-0-ENTER, then I hit "confirm with receipt". Message to the bank: how about if you customize my options so that one of the first buttons I have the option of hitting reads "withdraw $300 like you have every time you've been here in the past ten years". I'd really like to hit just one button instead of ten. Doesn't seem like rocket science.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I'm with the Europe folks on this one - This is really only news for Americans. Here in Japan, ATMs have had this sort of functionality via the Postal Savings system for years. That, and most ATMs at convenient stores can be used to pay utilities, purchase tickets, and a hoard of other services. Maybe US banks just don't feel any pressure to innovate. Hell, in comparison to the rest of the world in terms of a user experience it's not even innovation - it's catch-up.
Um, where exactly did you check on the SSN not being a valid form of identification? http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_154.html
My ex girlfriend used to use the Vcom all the time, and she was almost entirely technologically illiterate. After she used it the first time she said that it was "fun", and that she "felt like someone from the future".
If she can use one, almost anyone should be able to use one. She'd go cash her payroll checks, which she would get on Saturday night after 6pm. If the check was ever less than $300 there was no fee. Plus there was the added benefit of the Slurpee that she would get me before she left the store.
I thought that there was no way the machine would pay for itself, but she insisted that there were lines at times.
I think that the idea is a good one, I think that people will use it, and I think that we will see machines such as this for a long time to come.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu