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Perhaps, the best facility that a bank can ever extend to its customer is enabling round-the-clock access to ATMs for cash withdrawals. From bankers’ perspective, transaction costs at ATMs are far lower that at bank branches.

It is therefore a win-win situation for both customer and bank.

In a major initiative aimed at taking technology to the rural masses, biometric ATMs that use fingerprints to identify the account-holder have been installed by few banks in rural and semi-urban locations, and many more are to follow suit.

Though the growth of the ATM network in the last decade and a half has certainly picked up, mainly due to certain large banks, both in the private and public sector, its spread compared to the size of the population is still pretty low.

Two welcome moves put in place now are the RBI;s allowing banks to set up off-site ATMs without prior approval, subject to reporting, and making ATM usage for customer absolutely free, even if the a customer is using an ATM set up by another bank.

This is moving towards the one-nation, one-bank, and one-customer concept after the successful implementation of core banking solution by banks, and would certainly encourage banks to operate more ATMs.

With the sweeping changes taking place on technological front, an ATM is today viewed as beyond a mere cash dispensing machine.

Very soon, we might get to see ATMs that allow e-commerce transactions, offer cheque truncation solutions, and even talking ATMs, especially for physically challenged people, so that it can respond to their needs without their having to press buttons, and so on. Surely, this would be innovation at its very best.

Srinivasan Umashankar Nagpur

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