Cardless ATM’s and QR Codes
Posted on by Timothy Boyle
The debit card/credit card may be a dying technology, and you can thank QR codes for that. Three banks—BMO Harris in Chicago, City National in Las-Angeles, and Wintrust in Illinois—have begun testing a service to allow their banking customers to withdraw cash from their ATM’s with a simple scan of a QR code. They expect this new technology to be implemented in ever ATM machine by the end of 2014.
The way this works is that any customer of one of these banks can go onto the banks app and place an order for cash to be picked up at an ATM, even up to 24 hours prior. The customer, with their app open, scans the code on the ATM and the machine fulfills your order.
This new way of accessing your cash has a few benefits. First, it decreases the time of an ATM transaction by roughly 66%. Second, it should greatly increase security as it helps to fight back against things like “skimming”, and creates at least three barriers to accessing your account information on your phone (your phone login pin, bank account login, and card pin). Lastly, and most importantly, it helps to defend against the George Castanza wallet and a bad back.
This sort of QR code adoption (one might use NFC as well) is certainly a useful and beneficial possibility for the technology but a single or small group of businesses adopting this sort of technology does not make debit or credit cards obsolete.
What must happen for this technology to reach its potential is for all other industries and businesses to get on board and offer similar options for payment to their customers. We are starting to see the adoption of such a technology sporadically across many different industries but it has not quite reached critical mass. Having a bunch of banks adopt this technology might go a long way in sparking a full on evolution in the way we enter into transactions with other people and businesses.
Let’s just hope this happens soon…my back is killing me.
