Industries across the board have found a need to adjust as well. Restaurants have switched to catering more to takeout customers, businesses have had employees largely working from home, and the Arts industry has pivoted to remote offerings. The banking industry is no exception.
Even before the global pandemic, banks were steadily shifting away from in-person services to more online service options. From applying for loans to moving money between accounts, banks have moved a lot of services out of branches and onto computers.
A Boon for ATMs
This has meant good things for the ATM industry. Cash is a steady need in our society. With more and more bank branches closing, increasingly so during COVID-19, more and more people are turning to ATMs for their cash and banking needs.
In a MarketFoolery interview with The Motley Fool’s Chris Hill, when asked about some pending business merges guest Jason Moser stated, “To me, when you think a little bit deeper, this is really about the transformation of the physical banking branch. Being able to do more and more stuff via the ATM versus actually, I need to go into the actual branch, I think that’s something that does exist, I think that’s a strategy that exists out there today. It’s not just about going to an ATM to get cash, it’s about automated banking, it’s about having essentially a smaller branch, a branch that you can do just as much with an ATM as you would with a physical branch and you don’t have to staff the physical branch, you don’t want to pay for the real estate for the physical branch.”
Moser went on to say, “[I]nterestingly enough, the ATM business, in 2019, grew revenue 29%, and that goes toward that being able to do more banking via ATM versus actually having to go to the branch. But they offer all sorts of different solutions, it’s not just a hardware ATM business, it’s customer-facing digital banking, digital connected services, software solutions, ATM management systems and software, payment processing.”
As ATM technology continues to evolve and become more advanced, the banking industry will likely continue the shift to relying on ATMs for customer servicing. From applying for a home loan to paying your utility bill, the future of ATMs is not just about providing cash to society, they are increasingly about providing much needed services for society at large.
