Psbs Seen Installing 60% Of This Years New Atms
Public sector banks (PSBs) are expected to install 60 per cent of the total automated teller machines (ATMs) that the Indian banking sector is expected to put up this year.
Loney Antony, country manager and director, financial solutions division, NCR Corporation India, said the number of ATMs in the country is set to double from 4,500 in December 2001 to around 8,000 ATMs by the end of this year.
The company's US parent is one of the world's leading ATM manufacturers. NCR is also into cheque processing and data warehousing.
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The driving factor for the ATM segment will be PSBs which are getting into various technology initiatives such as Internet banking and phone banking, he said.
Of the 4,500 ATMs in the country, Antony says, NCR has set up around 2,500 ATMs. The other major ATM player in the country is Diebold.
PSBs such as the State Bank of India (SBI), Corporation Bank, Canara Bank, Punjab National Bank, Dena Bank, Bank of Baroda have finalised their ATM plans.
SBI plans to set up 1,000 ATMs across the country by March 31, 2002, of which 700 will be put up by NCR. Corporation Bank plans to set up around 250 ATMs before the end of the calendar year for which the mandate has been given to NCR. Of this, 125 will be put up by March 31, he added. It has also received an order to set up 50 ATMs for Canara Bank.
NCR has also set up a management centre for managing the ATMs of both SBI and Corporation Bank.
"The monitoring of a large network of 500 ATMs needs a large team of people and also different software and hardware. There are around 15 different services which are needed for running ATMs. We have set up a centralised monitoring network for ATMs. This helps to keep a constant watch on the ATMs' maintenance, currency management, software distribution and housekeeping," Antony said.
For an ATM to break-even, around 50-75 cash transactions are needed per day. To achieve return on investment, over 200 transactions are needed per day within a year, he said.
Some of the ATMs of PSBs have less than 100 transactions per day but they are fast catching up. Some of the new private sector banks have transactions of above 250 per day, Antony said.