`Normalisation of ATM services will take another ten days’

Mumbai:Banking giant State Bank of India today said normalisation of ATM services will take another ten days as the number of machines is huge but the vendors providing services are few.

The government, however, has said that most of the ATMs will be back in operation from tomorrow.

“Re-configuration (of ATMs), as we have done in the past, takes time so it has to be done one by one. It should be normal in ten days’ time because you have to understand that there are two lakh ATMs (of all banks) in the country but there are only three to four vendors in the country,” bank’s chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya said here.

Some of the bigger players providing ATM service are NCR Corporation and Hitachi.

She said many of the ATMs which are configured to dispense Rs 500 or Rs 1,000 notes can not dispense Rs 100 notes, so they have to be reconfigured now.

Bhattacharya said sending cash to the peripheral centres is also a challenge as it needs both transport as well as adequate security.

“In several states money has to be airlifted and it depends on the weather since the money is transported in helicopters. So there could be some problems with the peripheral areas,” she said.

She advised the customers to also use ‘point of sale’ machines, where they can withdraw up to Rs 2,000.

The government on Tuesday demonetised Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes in a step to curb black money. Following the move banks were closed on Wednesday to stock lower denomination notes. They opened today.

Long queues were seen today at banks as thousands flocked to deposit scrapped notes and withdraw lower-denomination and new banknotes.

Cash management agencies hope to normalise ATMs ops in 2 weeks

Mumbai:Cash management agencies that move billions of rupees in and out of over 2.2 lakh ATMs across the country have started a major exercise that may see Rs 40,000 crore worth of notes being shifted around and hope to normalise operations for the public in two weeks.

“We will put in three times normal efforts to ensure the inconveniences end at the earliest,” Rajiv Kaul, Managing Director and Vice-chairman of CMS Info System, which owns over half of the cash management market, told PTI today.

He said a high-level meeting was held at the Reserve Bank yesterday, which went on till late in the evening, to draw up an action plan of reducing the distress among the public.

A senior official said the meeting was chaired by Deputy Governor R Gandhi and also had representatives from the cash logistics association and confederation of ATM management companies, apart from officials from NPCI and RBI.

The work to be undertaken includes removing all the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, which account for 90 per cent of the currency at ATMs, and replenishing them with Rs 100 notes, carrying out changes at the Switch level to ensure banned notes are not dispensed and reconfiguring the machines to handle the newer Rs 500 and Rs 2,000 notes.

Asked about the cash that will be handled as part of this exercise, an official from CMS, who was present at the meeting with RBI, estimated that up to Rs 40,000 crore of high-value banknotes will be evacuated while Rs 4,000 crore of Rs 100 denomination bills will be put into the machines.

“The public will keep facing troubles as ATMs can hold only a limited number of Rs 100 notes and will have to be reconfigured. In the next 3-4 days, the operations will be normalised by 60 per cent and in the next two weeks, it will be normal,” the official said.

Generally, one among the 8,000 vans visits an ATM around 12-15 times a month. These visits will go up to as much as twice daily, the official said, adding that a decision has been taken for using even the unclean Rs 100 notes.

While banning the Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 banknotes to act against black money, the government said over Rs 16 trillion cash is in the system, of which over 85 per cent are held in high-value denominations.

Announcing the move, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said there would be difficulties in the short term, but it would deliver good over the longer term.

PTI