Why are ATMs so keen to show me my balance?

Question

I live in the UK, the following is representative of ATMs here, dunno about elsewhere.

When I go to the ATM, my desired user experience is usually:

• enter my card and PIN
• press the button for how much money I want to withdraw.

I can't speak for everyone, but this covered 99% of my usage. Ideally this would involve exactly 5 button presses in total (4 PIN + 1 amount).

Most ATMs seem to put a couple of extra steps into the workflow. The conversation usually goes something like this:

• What service would you like? View Balance, Cash & Reciept, Cash, ...etc... [ Cash ]

• How much do you want to withdraw? [ £X ]

• Would you like to see you balance first? [ No ]

These machines have different software depending on who owns them (all of which have bad menu design IMO) nevertheless they all seem to agree that seeing the balance is so important that they will offer you the option twice, even to go as far as interrupting the workflow in order to suggest it a second time. They seem pretty sure I hit the "Cash" button by mistake. I have seen some machines which even offer you the balance three times.

Considering the other design quirks are not consistent between vendors, I don't think this is a coincidence. What's the rationale behind this nagging design?

Answer 1

Because each service that the ATM network provider offers is chargeable to the bank. (By 'provider' I don't mean the bank, but the companies such as Link that provide the infrastructure to communicate between banks).

So if you request just cash then that's only one chargeable service, and the atm provider can only charge the bank for one transaction. But if you choose cash AND balance that results in 2 separate transactions, so the atm provider charges the bank for 2 separate transactions. This is how the providers make their money - charging the banks for each transaction they carry out. Therefore they try to get you to use as many services as they can whenever you visit a machine, so they can make the most money.

This is one of the reasons ATMs are free to use on the UK - because the fees are collected by Link directly from the banks.

In some countries you do get charged to use the ATM, but in the UK all the banks agreed not to put the fees on the customers, but take them on themselves as a way of providing better service (they'd rather you use the ATMs as they effectively lose money when the cash is physically sat in ATMs doing nothing).