NCR’s India Specific ATM Wins The Banker Technology Award

NCR has been named the winner in the Self-Service category of The Banker Technology Awards 2004. This is the second successive year that NCR has won this prestigious award. Sponsored by The Banker, the awards recognize “best of breed, innovation and success in financial technology.”
NCR won the award for its EasyPoint 57i (ASAN), the first ATM designed specifically for the fast-growing self-service market in India that enables banks to meet the needs of millions more customers. The judges noted that “NCR is making use of existing, proven technologies to deliver significant value to the specific marketplace.”
ASAN is the first ATM designed to meet Indian infrastructural challenges. Its small size and low running costs offer banks a low total cost of ownership, safeguarding their investment even in locations with relatively low transaction volumes. Using ASAN, banks can provide convenient service to the largely untapped non-urban areas, as well as urban areas such as corporate offices and factories, malls and branch extension counters.
The ATM has a number of important features. ASAN supports wireless connectivity through GPRS and CDMA communication technologies for areas with poor conventional telecommunications connectivity. Its balanced pressure system and enhanced dust filtration facilitate deployment in non-air-conditioned and dusty environments and ensuring maximum reliability even in the most challenging environments. The unique NCR Intelligent Power Management system, with an integrated uninterrupted power supply, ensures that in case of power failure ASAN completes any ongoing transaction – an essential application in situations of frequent and sudden power outages. Ensuring availability, even during power supply interruptions, means improved customer service and greater opportunities for revenue generating transactions. ASAN uses NCR’s proven APTRA software, so a deployer can run the same application software across its entire network, again allowing a lower total cost of ownership.
ASAN combines NCR’s global expertise and insights into the Indian ATM market with consumer-research-based design inputs from the Industrial Design Centre at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai (IIT-B). This enables the right “look and feel” in ASAN’s physical appearance and user interface.
Keith Taylor, senior vice president of NCR’s Financial Solutions Division, said “I believe we have a solution best suited to the needs of this important market and am delighted that our work in this area has been recognized by The Banker. A key goal for NCR is to help our customers improve their business through revenue growth and cost reduction while improving the relationship that they have with their own customers. The provision of localized ATMs that exhibit low ownership costs yet still support advanced software solutions is one way of achieving this.”