By By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff, 02/11/99
If the day hasn't arrived yet, it seems certain that before too long kids in America will find it hard to believe you once had to deal with a human being called a teller to get your money out of the bank.
With the way technology is evolving, a decade from now children might find it impossible to imagine that there was a time when all that automated teller machines gave out was money.
As more and more banks convert to ATMs that use complex touch screens to execute transactions instead of limited numeric keypads, an amazing range of possibilities is opening up for the corner bank machine.
While machines that vend stamps and offer
coupons are becoming more common in Greater Boston, they are only the beginning: Prepaid telephone cards, theater and movie tickets, ski-lift tickets, MBTA passes, and gift certificates are among the many other products banks are considering offering.
Besides alternative products, new ATMs could also offer access to a wide range of information and services, such as trading stocks and mutual funds, applying for loans and learning the latest news headlines.
''There's a huge effort going on right now to do what we call non-cash dispensing,'' says Randy Gearhart, director of ATM development for BankBoston.
The key technological innovation driving expanded ATM use is the growing prevalence of touch-screen computers, which allow people to put their fingers on an electrically sensitive surface to select a transaction.
The first generation of ATMs, using a 10-digit number pad and buttons corresponding to four or eight preset actions, have been necessarily limited to a short menu with options like withdraw from checking or show balances.
By moving to touch screens, banks can offer unlimited options beyond just withdrawing money or transferring dollars among accounts. BankBoston, for example, has moved to touch-screen technology for more than 750 of its 1,600 ATMs. Those now serve more than 60 percent of all ATM transactions, according to bank officials.
One approach is to program machines to have multiple displays corresponding to financial transactions, ticket purchases, or information requests.
For the most complicated tasks, touch screens could be programmed to display a 26-letter keyboard on the lower half of the screen. That would allow people to use the ATM for complex requests such as buying 500 shares of Consolidated Amalgamated or reserving two first-class tickets on the Tuesday flight to Bimini.
Bob Shay, BankBoston's executive director of global electronic banking, says the ''holy grail'' for banks is to find a universally accepted, fraud-proof medium for printing a broad range of tickets through ATMs.
Ideally, banks would be able to get sports arenas, cinemas, airlines and other businesses to accept a universal, printable ticket that might include security features such as a watermark or hologram to prevent forgery.
While banks are only beginning to exploit ATMs, experiments now underway suggest the boggling range of capabilities the machines could soon offer:
Spanish banks using Diebold machines have begun selling bullfight and opera tickets.
Cathay Pacific Airways has begun rolling out ATMs inside jetliners that allow users to exchange currency or buy cards for inflight entertainment.
In Charlotte, N.C., and Orlando, First Union Bank plans this spring to roll out machines that register a photographic image of people using the ATM instead of a card to verify their identity when they cash a check.
By establishing their identity over the phone the first time they use the machine and having a picture taken, people will later be able to cash checks on the spot by entering their Social Security number and having their identity verified through ''biometric'' comparisons made by two cameras. However, customers will pay a fee of up to $3 per $100 cashed.
Elsewhere in the world, including England and South Africa, banks are developing technologies such as retina or thumbprint scans as an alternative to requiring customers to carry a bank card with an electronic strip.
Later this year, BankBoston expects to install modular printers inside ATMs that will allow people to request, for an as-yet-unspecified fee, an up-to-the-minute printed bank statement. The printers will go behind panels that now have a slot the width of a standard piece of office paper.
Singapore banks use ATMs to issue checks to customers as a way of curbing mail fraud and theft of checks. While customers wait for about 2 minutes, the machine prints up, binds and dispenses a supply of 15 or 20 personalized checks.
One limitation is that currently, most machines used by BankBoston and other banks hold four cassettes. Normally, all four hold money. In machines that sell stamps, one of the four cassettes is converted to dispense stamps.
The downside to converting cassettes to hold different products is that it increases the frequency bank employees need to refill the machine with money, as well as the risk someone trying to make a withdrawal will find the machine out of service because it has run out of cash.
''The economics of getting rid of a cash cassette versus the number of customers we would serve'' by offering other products ''haven't made a whole lot of sense so far,'' Gearhart says. ''There needs to be demand and there needs to be a business case for doing it.''
See how future ATMs work.