ATMIA Times January 2007

Meet the inventor of the ATM,
Mr John Shepherd-Barron, OBE, at ATMIA's Conference East, 20-23 February 2007 - www.atmiaconferences.com

ATMIA Africa Partners with Members and Other Stakeholders in Joint-Industry Forums

By Brian McLean, Executive Director, ATMIA Africa

The African chapter of ATMIA has been busy with two separate issues of public interest in South Africa as well as one initiative of relevance to many emerging ATM markets on the African continent.

An ATMIA-led member delegation met with executives of the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) to address our concerns over some aspects of the SARB’s intention to promulgate more stringent cash recycling standards for the country. We believed the standards may be too stringent for smaller ATM operators, particularly those employing the merchant-fill model in more remote areas of the country.

We agreed to form a joint training forum to find ways to work together on training requirements for the option of manual checking of bank notes for counterfeit and unfit notes. The SARB also subsequently elected to phase-in the standards over a three year period.

To enhance safety awareness
To enhance client education
To obtain effective crime intelligence
To create a multi-disciplinary operations model
To review and implement minimum industry security standards with regard to ATM crime as established globally, but adapted to the local crime environment
To identify key risk scenarios for 2010 and beyond (South Africa hosts the soccer World Cup in 2010)
To stay abreast of technical developments in the ATM industry
To obtain the high level commitment of all industry players
To make the ATM crime forum sustainable
To maximise and incorporate existing initiatives

The workload has been distributed across three working groups who have presented their business plans and assigned their team members. Updates on the forum’s progress will be provided at ATMIA’s 2nd Africa Consumer Banking Convention in April and in future editions of ATMIA Times.

A major aim for ATMIA Africa in 2007 is to further the aims of the newly formed African ATM Technology Enablement Forum. The purpose of this initiative, the brain-child of ATMIA’s CEO, Mike Lee, is to advise emerging African markets on:

infrastructure requirements for successful mass ATM deployment in a country
sustainable models for ATM networks, processors and switches
business models for bank and ISO deployment of branch and convenience ATMs
approaching the World Bank and IMF for loans for national technology upliftment in Africa