Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) were designed to reduce stress on customers of banks seeking to withdraw money. ATMs provide services to card holders wherever they may find themselves.
Some of us who know the cheque era can remember the frustration customers experienced while collecting money, especially at the end of the month when salaries were paid. Customers had to be given a tally because the queue was so long and chaotic. In Nigeria’s characteristic manner of impatience, people would shun the queue, reserve and even physically fight.
Some readers may remember one popular advert, I can’t remember for which bank, where customers came to the bank with their sleeping mats and that popular phrase, ‘’Give me my tally number’’ is still fresh in my mind.
To make things worse, you could only cash money from the bank whose cheques you held. For instance, you couldn’t use a First Banks cheque to collect cash at UBA. If you were given a Unity Bank cheque you could only cash it at Unity Bank!
Transfers took longer time. One had to use bank drafts, etc.
Today, many young people do not even know that people used cheques to cash money. Some months ago my ATM has experienced and I needed money, so I gave my son, a level 3 undergraduate student, a cheque to cash and he was puzzled. “What is this?” I explained to him what a cheque is and he was surprised that one can use that paper and collect money. All he knows is the ATM card. It was an experience for him to cash money using a cheque.
During the pre-ATM era, people went to the bank once, twice or thrice in a month and managed their spending in such a way as to avoid going to the bank again until the coming month. That in some way helped customers to spend less and with some degree of discipline. It helped customers to ensure that they had cash at hand for every future transaction they might do because when the time came the banks might be closed or the long queues might delay or stop the transactions. In that period, it was money on demand-like.
The coming of the ATM has changed all that. When ATMs were introduced, many people hesitated to use them because they were scared of the technology and the reliability of the cards. So it was started as a kind of a voluntary service. If you wanted, you applied and got one.
As usual, young people who saw it as vogue started adapting the ATM before old people who were more familiar with the cheque system. But the Federal Government at the time was pushing for what it called ‘cashless economy’, even when many people, including me, felt it was too early to go fully cashless.
Today, most bank customers have ATM cards, sometimes at request, sometimes automatic. Even housewives have their ATMs and usually send someone to collect cash on their behalf, giving the cashier their password and all with no insurance.
With an ATM gave us more freedom to cash money at will, it gives us the opportunity to do transactions using our computers or even mobile handsets. It gives us the freedom to withdraw money from any available ATM anywhere in the world. ATM cards have created many an opportunity we never thought possible.
But they also come with their unique problems. Every new technology brings its challenges to people’s way of life. Just like mobile phones changed our lifestyles, leaving us wondering how life would be without them (forgetting that we lived without them safely and well), so have ATM cards.
Here we are holding beautiful, well-designed cards that we can always use anywhere anytime to withdraw cash and do transactions with the available monies in our account. So, with our ATM cards today, we have changed the way we spend money. We no longer have to cash money in advance and keep because we can always cash money from the ATM. We spend more money now and spend more at shops that operate Point of Sale (POS) where one can use one’s card to pay for transactions.
One doesn’t feel as much pinch when one uses ATM card as when one uses cash, so one can spend more using card.
The major challenges customers face using the ATM cards include annoying phrases like dispense error, temporarily unable to dispense cash, the issuer is none cooperative, out of service and the ATM queues which are different from the banking hall queues.
Let’s start with the quality of service provided. All the signboards of ATMs usually have 24/7 on them, meaning they,are available for 24 hours daily, 7 times a week. This shows that one can withdraw money any time one chooses. But is that so? Can we really get the money anytime, anywhere?
There are ATMs located in bank premises and some outside bank premises. It is understandable that you go to a non-bank premises ATM and fail to get money, but it is inconceivable that you fail to get money in a bank-premises ATM.This is one aspect that bankers show most irresponsibility to customers.
Bankers should know the frequency and quantum of withdrawals at different periods of the month and ensure that money is made available at peak points – usually month’s end. What are their research units doing not to understand customers’ demand pattern?
One can visit 10 to 20 ATMs and be annoyingly told, “Temporarily unable to dispense cash”. This attitude must stop! The Central Bank of Nigeria, which preaches and imposed this new innovation, must come to the aid of customers.
At some banks, the night watchmen at their own will or on instruction lock the gates of the ATMs at 10:00 pm while the signboard is still telling you that the ATM provides services 24/7.
There is also the problem of dispensing error. I changed my bank because they could not get my money back after I was debited a hundred thousand naira without dispensing and my bank could only get me 60,000 naira and for over four years today my 40,000 is still missing in action. At the new bank I moved to, it took me 43 days to reverse a “dispense error” of N20,000.
In fact, many people lose money unnecessarily due to dispense error. I have no doubt that if the CBN is to commission a study on dispense error, it will find that Nigerians are losing billions. Where are the monies going? No one is being punished.
Finally, I want to stop here with a call on the supervising agencies to come to the aid of customers. Customers pay for the services given by banks and banks should be made more responsible to meet their customers’ needs.
Severe punishment must be meted on erring banks that make customers suffer from their incompetence and neglect.
* Professor Yusuf Adamu is a senior lecturer at Bayero University, Kano
