Prosegur has fired an early salvo in its looming battle with Armaguard for control of the Australian ATM banking market, with the launch of a new brand for its proprietary automated teller network.
Over the next 12 months Prosegur will progressively market its fleet under the ‘Precinct’ banner and invite all authorised deposit taking institutions to subscribe to the service.
Prosegur and Armaguard are marketing their networks to ADIs as a way to save costs on continuing to meet customer demand for cash.
Prosegur is in the process of rebranding up to 750 offsite Westpac machines after acquiring the fleet last year.
In an online presentation to members of the ATM Industry Association on Tuesday, Prosegur’s head of strategy and business lead for the Precinct rollout, Matt Sykes, laid out the company’s blueprint for establishing a sustainable network across the country.
Precinct’s business case rests on banks entering partner agreements under which they pay fees for their customers continuing to receive free access to ATM machines.
“We are actively working on the rebranding of the fleet and we expect this to be completed in the first few months of next year, but we are also expanding the fleet,” he told the ATMIA conference.
“We already have 68 locations locked in or in advanced stages of negotiation and a further 50 locations that are in advanced review – that means by the time we are rebranding the fleet we expect it to have grown by 15 per cent.
“Those 100-plus new locations are just the start of our rollout plan – we are working closely with a range of property and retail partners to identify locations that increase the density of coverage of the network.”
With its acquisition of ANZ’s offsite fleet and a portion of CBA’s ATMs, Armaguard currently enjoys a larger distribution footprint than Precinct, but Sykes suggested that the advantage would only be temporary.
He said Precinct machines would be able to service up to 20 million Australian ADI customers within 12 months.
“We are aware of another ATM fleet that is being developed in the Australian market at the moment,” he told the ATMIA.
“Based on estimates of the unique coverage at the community level of this fleet we suspect there will be a negligible difference in the ability for the community to access cash whether in metropolitan areas or rural and remote communities.”
Sykes said Precinct was targeting fresh ATM deployments in 500 communities across Australia, ranging from regional towns that currently have no automated teller service to urban centres where demand was driving a higher density of ATMs.
Precinct is now inviting prospective banking partners to engage with the company to get feedback on where they would prefer machines to be deployed in their customers’ communities.
Sykes told ATMIA members that the machines were being reprogrammed to automatically present customised interactive screens when a particular bank’s customer inserts a card into any Precinct ATM.
Apart from giving banks control over the design of the customer experience, Precinct is pitching its service as a way for ADIs to meet their community service obligations to customers in rural and remote parts of the country.
Armaguard executive Con Tsiknis is expected to give a presentation on the business case for the recently launched atmx fleet to ATMIA members in an online briefing this morning.