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Look for cardless cash access at more ATMs in coming months. Fidelity National Information Services Inc. (FIS) and Payment Alliance International Inc. plan to bring the FIS Cardless Cash service to more than 70,000 PAI ATMs.
The deal, announced Friday, will significantly expand the number of participating machines from the current tally of 2,500 that work with the FIS Cardless Cash service. PAI expects to have 25,000 machines equipped to make Cardless Cash transactions by the end of 2017, Donna Embry, chief payments advisor at Louisville, Ky.-based PAI, tells Digital Transactions News.
The consumer is automatically registered to use FIS’s Cardless Cash service following a successful authentication with the bank’s app. Once that’s done, the consumer can tap the Cardless Cash button in the app to set up a transaction. Upon arrival at a participating ATM, the consumer presses the Cardless Cash button on the ATM display. A quick-response barcode appears. From within the banking app—which can be authenticated using the smart phone’s biometric sensor—she accesses the smart-phone’s camera to scan the QR code. The app makes a backend check on the account. If authorized, instructions are sent to the machine to dispense the cash. There is communication between the phone and the ATM, but it’s over a secure cloud service using tokenized data.
Currently, 35 banks offer FIS Cardless Cash, Doug Brown, FIS senior vice president and general manager of FIS Mobile, tells Digital Transactions News. Data from FIS’s current cardless cash ATMs shows some machines running more than 200 such transactions per month, Brown says. The service, as software only, requires no special hardware modifications to ATMs.
Embry says the software-only nature of the FIS service means there will be no capital cost for independent ATM deployers, she says. “All new machines we sell will be immediately enabled,” Embry says. FIS Cardless Cash should be available on PAI machines beginning in September, she notes.
The FIS program is one of three cardless ATM services PAI participates in. The others include Pin4, a service from HalCash North America, and Fiserv Inc.’s Popmoney, a peer-to-peer money-transfer service that is enabled on about 5,000 PAI machines, Embry says. Pin4 is in tests in four cities, and PAI anticipates a full release in August, she says.
PAI’s decision to embrace cardless ATM transactions is in anticipation of how card-based payments are adding digital versions of themselves, Embry says. “It’s not just the future for ATMs and ATM transactions, it will easily transfer to the point of sale for payments in the future,” she says. “This will help to train the consumer and get them ready for tokenized transactions, or QR codes or a different way for authentication, without having to absorb a lot of costs for hardware.”
