Just as it is well known in business circles that there is no such thing as a free lunch, there will soon be no such thing as free cash delivery from your bank’s automated teller machine, the quid pro quo being the bank’s opportunity to sell you lots of other goods and services while you haplessly await your hard- earned cash. This is borne out by the spate of announcements coming out of the Retail Delivery 97 conference in New Orleans (CI No 3,303), the latest of which sees ATM supplier Diebold Inc announce a new internet-enabled ATM architecture, supported by Microsoft Corp and its own new architecture for financial services, which will facilitate delivery of these new products and services using internet technologies. Diebold’s OPTimum is a software architecture built on Windows NT Server, which supports Microsoft Corp’s newly announced Windows DNA Distributed iNternet Architecture for Financial Services. The Microsoft architecture is a framework which enables different protocols and messaging systems to talk to each other, for example internet protocols such as HTTP and TCP/IP. It has been specifically designed for the financial services industry to enable legacy mainframes, Unix-based systems and Windows NT-based systems to talk to each other and use the same data sources, with delivery channels to a number of user interfaces including internet-based home banking and the ATM. OPTimum, which is based on the COM Component Object Model, enables banks to build a transaction once, and push it through multiple delivery channels. Traditionally, most of the ATM control and content has been contained within the actual ATM itself. The OPTimum architecture will enable some applications to reside on networked servers, thus opening up the range of services that can be provided through the ATM. Both KeyBank and Wells Fargo Bank are currently piloting the new architecture, which runs only on Diebold’s ATM’s at present.
