https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/the-infrastructure-behind-atms/
"ATMs are a fascinating example of a pattern we see a lot in finance: an
internal operations improvement which was built into a business which
eventually begat an infrastructure layer that may be a much bigger business.
And for all their ubiquity, almost no one, even people professionally involved
in finance, understand how they work.
The first automated teller machines, which debuted in the late 1960s, were, as
the name suggests, strictly cost-saving devices for bank branches. Branches
exist as sales offices but have incidental cash-management functions. The
denser depositors are around a branch, the more transactions happen during peak
windows like e.g. the morning commute and lunchtime. The more transactions you
need to support in a window, the more tellers you need to employ. Tellers are
both surprisingly inexpensive relative to the degree of trust placed in them
but surprisingly costly relative to occupations like e.g. cashiers which look
outwardly similar. Banks have long wanted to control the costs of the teller
base.
The original thesis behind the ATM was that you could move the most routine
teller transactions, like cash withdrawals and balance inquiries, to a machine,
and then reserve the teller for higher-complexity routine transactions like
cashing checks. The machines gradually gained more features as they achieved
ubiquity.
Interestingly, teller employment is actually up substantially since the
introduction of ATMs. Secular demand for retail banking grew with the economy
and the larger number of branches has compensated for reduced numbers of
tellers per branch."
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "I didn’t know ANY of this."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
