When I entered community banking, one of my least favorite responsibilities was servicing the automated teller machines (ATMs). As a young officer at a small community bank, I, along with a few of our other young officers, was tasked with resupplying the bank's local ATMs with cash, scheduling maintenance on them when they went down, and rotating being "on call" for responding to after-hours ATM problems that arose from time to time. Not only did it seem to be an inconvenient interruption to my day (or night, in the case of an after-hours issue that I had to respond to), but it just was not a very exciting part of banking. After all, at that time ATMs had been around for decades, had become ubiquitous, and rarely presented much risk so long as proper security procedures were maintained with respect to restocking the machines with cash. They were so routine that the federal banking regulators didn’t even require banks to file an application before opening one away from a branch location. Continue reading >