From Asian Banking and Finance

ATMs on airplanes did not catch on when they were tried six years ago, but cash terminals in unusual locations have now been enabled by new communications technologies says Diebold Vice President for Product Marketing & Management Ken Justice. River boats, cruise ships and mobile ATMs in trucks are now deployed, with VSAT (satellite), GPRS (a GSM mobile technology), WLAN (wireless local area network) and Bluetooth, all existing and potential transmission means for financial data.

“You will have ATMs where people will want to go. Cash is still certainly not going away,” said Justice. In lower transaction areas, where there may only be 400-500 transactions a month, banks can reduce on communications costs by making use of dial-up internet access said Justice.

And in high transaction areas, solutions such as their one year-old Opteva technology enable up to 30,000 transactions a month with reduced risk for banks.

Enthusiasm for the outsourcing of ATM solutions has toned down in recent months due to a fear of ATM down-time believes Justice. Physical security as well as protection of the computer network is very important to Diebold.

“As more and more ATMs move from OS2 to Windows and a TCP IP environment, networks do become more vulnerable. We’re offering, standard with all of our ATMs, a firewall with a company called Sygate. This is to keep viruses and so on at bay.”