Visio-banking: NCR Takes Majority Stake in uGenius
- NCR has just acquired a majority stake in uGenius, visio-banking services provider with which it has been collaborating to develop new generation ATMs in 2011. The terms and figures of this investment have not been disclosed.
- NCR has not revealed any names or effective orders either but insists that several banking players have shown interest in its APTRA Interactive Teller, an uGenius-designed ATM including videoconference to enable distant advisor/customer interaction. Also, NCR does believe in the added value of these interactive solutions as different banks now tend to lower their functioning costs, especially in branches.
- Still according to NCR, this investment should enable uGenius to hire more people and further develop its R&D unit as the specialist is also of interest for both Western players and developing countries.
- The transition towards dematerialising bank/customer exchanges should involve communication tools likely to remedy the distant approach-related inconvenient. NCR has been standing at the heart of innovation and, these past months, has been making several announcements to highlight different initiatives on banking inclusion, accessibility and ATM-based interactivity (see previous Insights).
- uGenius’s solutions have been experimented in 2006 in North Carolina by the Coastal Federal Credit Union. Several test phases have been launched ever since in the US and uGenius has now been adopted by about twenty institutions. NCR’s APTRA Interactive Teller was launched in 2011: it has been adopted by an Australian bank in September 2011 (see August 2011 Insight).