If you can pull money out of almost any ATM why can you not deposit money into almost any ATM?
In: 210
Roughly speaking, the difference in requirements between the two is the following:
Withdrawals only: The machine has to somehow authenticate you (card, pinpad, biometry), has to retrieve and update info on your balance, and count and dispense the cash. It doesn’t have to check that the cash inside is legit, the bank put it there. And it doesn’t have to check the note values because they are coming from pre-specified stacks.
Withdrawals + Deposits: it has to do all of the above plus take notes, reliably check if they are real, if they are whole, and what is their value amount. And to do this for a bunch of different kinds of bank notes of all values, ages and amounts of use. Then it has to redirect the notes to the correct stacks.
To do all that, hardware requirement is quite big. All sorts of sensors are needed to defeat counterfeiters (UV, magnetic, infrared, scanner, etc). Not only the hardware has an associated cost, but more complexity equals more maintenance.
The alternative is the machine taking envelopes, which would generate a reverse logistic to take the notes back to the bank from all the machines, and manually confirm the deposit there.
So anyway it’s much more complex, expensive, and demand from individuals for this service is quite low on the age of internet banking (though I can see why it’s convenient for cash businesses).
Latest Answers