Yes, it did.  It was one Friday night on the way home from work and I was having one of those moments. I had literally just watched my bus home pull out of the station on a night I was rushing to get home to go out with friends. So as I watched the bus’s tail lights disappear at a distance, I had a thought; I will withdraw some money out now to save me time then I won’t have to do it on the way out to meet my friends. 

London is littered with several Automated Teller Machines (ATMs), and at the station, I had no problem of finding one. So I headed for the nearest.  I entered my PIN and the ATM politely displayed a notice that said thank you for waiting while we process your request. So I waited. And I waited some more. Finally, the machine went out of service and swallowed my card.  Astonishing, I thought to myself. My time saving strategy had backfired on me!

In the end, I had to move on with my evening. When I finally caught my bus home my thoughts turned to thinking about a) how I was going to pay for dinner that night and b) how much we have come to rely on ATMs over the last few years. In fact, when the world’s first ATM was installed in London by Barclays Bank in 1967, the main reason was to provide a high degree of convenience beyond bank hours, for customers withdraw cash to pay for a variety of products and services. The move also sought to reduce the degree of risk that was attached to carrying large sums of money. Inevitably, the ATM trend caught on and today the United Kingdom is home to some 66,134 cash machines. These ATMs are believed to dispense on average £6,139 per second – quite an amount.

But what else can ATMs be used for and what does the future hold? To begin with, ATMs have also been developed to provide us with a range of services from bill payments to mini statements; to showing balances and letting us make deposits into our accounts and buy prepaid mobile phone credit.  Also, over recent years we have seen ATMs used as marketing tools with advertisements of local and international products appearing. In the UK, the Royal National Institute for the Blind (RNIB) has worked with the main banks to develop talking ATMs to make the ATM network accessible to blind and partially sighted people. Several banks have signed up to the RNIB campaign. 

In the United States and Spain, Virtual Teller Machines (VTMs) are being developed to allow customers to interact with cashiers connected via webcam.  These machines will be used to carry out activities that traditionally have been handled only by bank employees in person, such as cheque cashing.

In China, the Bank of Lanzhou has installed ATMs which use finger vein authentication technology. Experts believe that using vein patterns to identify customers is more secure than fingerprints and also has the potential to minimise the calculations required for authentication. This type of technology is already widespread in Japan.

Notably, however, ATMs also remain attractive targets to crooks. Recently, thieves dug a 50ft tunnel under a supermarket store in Manchester to get into an ATM.  Also, weak security measures such as lack of close circuit television cameras at every ATM could encourage fraudsters to manipulate card slots. For these reasons, banks continue to invest heavily in protecting ATMs so that customers can always have a smooth experience whilst keeping operation costs relatively down.

By and large, as I pondered on my next move without my bank card, I also thought of the benefits of ATMs and the need for banks in Rwanda to invest substantially in them. ATMs have the potential to reduce queues at banks, save banks costs in hiring tellers, and more importantly, extend services beyond normal banking hours. The existence of ATMs also allows people to carry less cash on their person as they can withdraw money from their accounts conveniently 24 hours a day seven days a week. Clearly, the benefits of ATMs are significant.

Oh, and I should note that even without my bank card that night, I was happy to remember that my bank runs a service called ‘emergency cash’, which allows customers to have access to their accounts by using an emergency PIN provided over the telephone.

The writer is a UK Parliamentary Intern and holds a Master of Science in Public Services Policy.