The index revealed a month-over-month bump of 4.03 percent during April to R435.47 ($52.36) per transaction, compared with month-over-month rise of 1.46 percent in March. Excluding the month of December, this represented the highest average withdrawal value in six years. Year-over-year, the index metered a 3.02 percent increase.

April withdrawals were primarily driven by public, school and religious holidays. As predicted following the January and February withdrawal slump, consumer spending has gathered momentum and returned to positive gains during March and April.

Dawie Klopper, an investment economist at PSG Konsult, agree that the increase in cash withdrawals was significantly affected by the April holidays. “It is clear from previous cash withdrawal statistics that the same pattern has occurred in previous years,” Klopper said.

The Spark Cash Index (SCI) measures the average value of cash withdrawals across more than 1,500 Spark ATM Systems’ ATMs throughout the country. The data is derived from every region in South Africa and ranges from rural areas to city centers.

According to Spark, the cash index tracks very closely with the country’s Retail Sales Report and provides an accurate early indicator of economic activity.

For more on this topic, visit the trends/statistics research center.

Article source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/194687/Spark-Cash-Index-indicates-upswing-in-SA-spending

The article profiled the NCR/uGenius partnership that resulted in an interactive ATM venture, and noted that the next-gen ATMs seem apt to chisel out a foothold in the banking sector.

NCR spokesman Jeff Dudash told Time that since rolling out the machines in March, the company had signed deals with six FIs for installation of the machines. And Bank of America spokeswoman Tara Burke told Time that pending review of a test in four market, the bank was set for a wider rollout of video teller ATMs.

The Time article noted the 24/7 service available from many of the interactive ATMs as one of their biggest attractions, referring to a report in The Financial Brand that after one credit union installed a virtual teller system, 60 percent of its transactions took place outside of standard business hours.

For more on this topic, visit the multifunction ATMs research center.

Article source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/194689/Video-teller-ATMs-get-face-time-in-Time

According to a report by The Scranton Times-Tribune, a 53-year-old man had stopped at a drive-up ATM to get cash when he was accosted by another man with a knife, which the victim shortly found pressed against the back of his neck.

When the attacker demanded money, the victim asked him to be patient while he entered his information into the ATM.

Then he floored the accelerator, speeding away with the robber hanging onto his car, police told the Times-Tribune.

The victim escaped with only a slight laceration, the article said. Police are now seeking a badly bruised man in tan Carhartt overalls with skidmarks. 

For more on this topic, visit the security research center.

Article source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/194691/Don-t-bring-a-knife-to-a-drive-up-ATM-fight

Initially 1,000 commuters in the city of Durban will receive the NFC-enabled “Muvo” card, said an article at finextra.com. Muvo features the MasterCard PayPass app and MChip 4 data chip. Cardholders can load money for bus travel onto the chip at kiosks, then upon boarding a bus, simply tap the card on the on-board card reader to pay their fare.

Assuming a successful pilot, the card will be rolled out to 550,000 additional area commuters. Herman Singh, CEO of Standard Bank’s innovation unit, Beyond Payments, said he expected the card to be a stepping stone to NFC-based mobile shopping.

“It is inevitable that we will all be using our phones to pay at merchants in the future,” said Singh. “However it’s important to recognise that this is a journey and not a destination — there will be no big bang launch, but eventually we will see all individuals routinely paying with phones at all merchants on the high street.” 

For more on this topic, visit the EMV research center.

Article source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/194695/Bank-issues-dual-function-transit-ticketing-debit-card

The ATMs were purchased through Jamaican IAD Management Control Systems. Dianne Smith-Sears, general manager of MC Systems, said the cash recycling ATM will change the way the financial sector does business.

“In addition to the convenience of being able to withdraw cash at any time, the user will experience the same ease in making cash lodgements to their accounts. The machines will accept the notes directly … and will count and request verification of the total lodgement. The account balance is immediately updated and the amount made available for their use,” said Smith-Sears in a JN press release.

Eddy Carrioni, sales support and product marketing manager for Diebold, said MCS has “brought a worldwide trend into the Caribbean.” He presented MC Systems with an award from Diebold for being the first company to introduce the cash recycler.

For more on this topic, visit the installation/deployment research center.

Article source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/194699/First-cash-recycling-ATM-comes-to-the-Caribbean

The agreement between the Indian companies will provide no-frills savings accounts at Axis Bank to customers on the airtel money platform. Airtel money Super Account powered by Axis Bank will allow banking transactions such as cash deposit, money transfer, withdrawal and remittances. The accounts will pay savings account interest.

To start, savings and remittance solutions will be provided in India’s top four remittance corridors, with Delhi and Mumbai on the sending side and Bihar and East Uttar Pradesh on the receiving side. These services may later be extended to other remittance corridors in the country.

Other banking products and services such as micro recurring deposits, micro fixed deposits, small loans and micro-insurance products also will be added to the platform over time.

“We are delighted to partner with airtel for strengthening our financial inclusion initiative,” said Shikha Sharma, managing director and CEO of Axis Bank, at a launch event in Mumbai. “Our alliance with airtel will help the bank to reach out to excluded segments of our population, both in rural and urban centers.”

Sanjay Kapoor, CEO for India and South Asia at Bharti Airtel said, “[N]early 43 percent of our country’s population does not have bank accounts and continues to rely on cash for majority of transactions as well as payments. The all new ‘airtel money Super Account powered by Axis Bank’ … [will] empower customers to send money, withdraw cash from the nearby designated airtel money outlets, keep money safe and even enjoy interest on savings through their mobile device. [W]e are confident that this association will play a transformational role in furthering economic empowerment and fast-tracking India’s financial inclusion agenda.”

For more on this topic, visit our mobile banking research center.

Article source: http://www.atmmarketplace.com/article/194709/Bank-telco-alliance-provides-no-frills-accounts-to-India-s-unbanked

By Randy Myers|April 18, 2012. Article found on entrepreneur.com

As raises go, this was a doozy. Andy Meadows, founder and CEO of custom software company Live Oak 360 in Austin, Texas, decided to increase his salary in the summer of 2010. He didn’t bump it up by 5 percent, or 10 percent, or even 25 percent. Instead, he doubled it — to what he calculated an outsider would charge to do his job. It was a stretch for his then eight-year-old company, but Meadows is now convinced it was the right thing to do.

“Raising my salary to a market level forced me to look at my company from an investor’s perspective,” Meadows says. “It helped me better understand the value of my own time.”

As he began looking at the hours he was devoting to different tasks, he explains, he began asking if they were really tasks he should be doing, based on what the company was paying him, or if they were better suited to one of his employees. Often, the latter was the case, and he learned to cede those tasks to others. “It allowed me to turn myself loose from a lot of digging and hunting for information, and spend more time finding new and better business,” he says now.

The case for market-based wages
Meadows’ epiphany resulted from his work with CPA and business consultant Greg Crabtree, founder of Crabtree, Rowe & Berger PC in Huntsville, Alabama, and author of “Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!” (Greenleaf Book Group Press, 2011). Meadows had hired him to help split Live Oak 360 into three distinct companies.

Crabtree helped with that restructuring, while also driving home his view that as many as 90 percent of entrepreneurs underpay themselves in what often proves to be a misguided attempt at thrift. It then skews their understanding of how well their companies are performing, and in some cases dilutes the incentive they need to make their companies more profitable. If their companies are structured as S corporations, it also can invite an audit from the Internal Revenue Service, which may see it as a ploy to avoid payroll taxes.

“If you’re not paying yourself a market-based wage, the net income on your books is irrelevant — it’s a lie,” Crabtree says. “Over time, you tend to forget that.”

While acknowledging that some entrepreneurs can’t afford to pay themselves a market-based wage, especially during their startup years, Crabtree recommends they at least maintain an extra set of pro forma books showing how their company would be performing if they did.

“If your market-based wage should be $100,000 and you’re only paying yourself $50,000, I want you to book that $100,000 in this extra set of records and show that loss of $50,000,” Crabtree says. “I want you to feel the pain. I want you to understand that until you’ve paid yourself a market-based wage and still turned a profit, you’re losing money.”

That brutally honest approach, Crabtree says, forces entrepreneurs to think about how long they’re willing to accept below-market wages before they fix what’s wrong or find something else to do for a living. “I can’t help them succeed unless I have them look at reality,” he says. He recalls working with one client, an engineer, who had switched careers and opened a bakery but simply wasn’t able to replace his old salary. After taking a hard look at the numbers, he closed his business.

An incentive to grow your business faster
For Meadows, the outcome was much better. Forced to justify the higher paychecks he was cashing, he says, he became more intently focused on growing his company’s business. Sales and profits rose. His employees began to grow, too, enhancing their career skills.

Small-business owners can arrive at a fairly good estimate of what their salary should be, Crabtree says, by visiting websites such as Salary.com or talking to their accountants, who probably do work for other small-business owners and can provide a general overview of what they’re seeing in the marketplace.

In addition to incentivizing them to improve their company’s operations, Crabtree says, taking a market-based wage can make it easier for entrepreneurs to appreciate what they must pay other key employees if they want to attract talented workers. After all, a business owner who cheats on his own salary is likely to find it hard to cough up a fair wage for those working under him.

“If you don’t pay market-based wages to your team, you set into motion things that force employee turnover, and the expense of that is well documented,” Crabtree says. “You also end up hiring people who are not that productive in the first place. If you pay a market-based wage, you can demand market-based performance.”

In short, Crabtree says, paying yourself a fair wage is a powerful engine for driving business growth and building wealth. If you’re not paying yourself what you’re worth, you may be hurting, not helping, your small business.

Triton has taken much of what they know from ATMs and have wrapped it into a UL listed vault with easy-to-use software. This safe is certified to the UL291 Level 1 vault attack test. Then there is the flexibility of the validator options from a 1000-note stacker, a 1200-note stacker, a 2200-note stacker and also a Bulk Note Feed option.

You can monitor your safe from a computer or smart phone. Yes you can send text messages to the people you choose with the specific alerts you choose.

This unit is set-up to be offered in a sort of “a la carte” philosophy. By that we mean the customer has the choice of what options and what (if any) armored service they choose. As a locksmith and dealer, you maintain your relationship with your customer.

Following is a list of the features and options involved with the product:

• Customers can own this unit for as little as $1 at the end of a lease. (Leases start as low as $159 per Month)
• Software customization is available
• Your customer can purchase this safe out right and skip the leasing option.
• We will work with your customer’s financial institution to develop the provisional deposit option. We do not require your customer to use their specific bank.
• By owning the safe outright and dealing directly with their bank, your customer can eliminate fees from the other companies that may or may not be seen, such as counting and verifying the money and also the guaranteeing of the funds in the safe.
• Triton guarantees the funds in the safe at no charge to your customer.
• Safes can be monitored live via a computer or Smart-Phone by using VersaLink Software.
• In the administration menu, owners can edit users and set programming groups. An upcoming feature will allow owners to edit users from across the country via phone. Owners can name their terminal so that in the case of multiple safes, they can be identified. They can also set up terminal groups.
• Owners can also delegate full monitoring capabilities of any safe.
• Safes are easy to service with no tools required to remove the control head.
• A 5.7” LCD screen makes wording easy to read.
• Extra-large buttons on the keypad for ease of use.
• The safe also provides mounting provisions for security equipment for such things as duress, thermal and seismic sensors, which can all be tied into existing building security.
• The system is a Windows CE based operating system.
• It supports 10,000 users.
• It stores up to 32,000 transactions on the board and virtually an unlimited amount of transactions on the main server through the VersaLink software option. With the optional monitoring software you have an off-site back-up system that even if there is a catastrophic failure, like flood or fire we can recover virtually all of your activity.
• We are now able to export files from the safe to many accounting programs, this is what accountants look for to make their lives easier.

Listed here are some of the items you can see live 24/7

• Contents of the safe broken down to individual cassettes
• The drops of every user by time, deposits, manual drops, reports, percent of contents in cassettes, even detail notes by denomination
• Reports based on Validator Close, Day Close, Drop Close, Pick-up Close, Shift Close and Journal Report
• Trigger reports to any computer of your choosing via email or Smart-Phone via Text Message for the following Items:
• Percent of capacity of the cassettes to notify when pick-ups are needed,
• Pre-set cash amount trigger for capacity of the cassettes,
• Deposit alert to notify specified persons of a gap in time of deposits,
• Activity alert to notify persons of a lack of activity on the safe set to a specific time frame
• Ability to restrict the times in which alerts are sent
• Alert triggered by a door opening.
• Versasafe Day Close Record, Cash Deposit Transaction Record, Drop Deposit Transaction Record, Bill Acceptor Close Report, Drop Close Record, Pickup Close Record and User Close Record.