Self service document processing for banking automation

The high street cash dispenser or automated teller machine (ATM) was one of the major technological successes of the eighties. A recent major advance in the development of the ATM has been to extend the range of services available to the consumer to include payment transactions eg. bill payment and cheque deposit. These additional services now make it possible for as ATM to provide the consumer with a complete suite of automated financial transactions at convenient locations 24 hours per day. The result of AT&Ts investment and development effort in this field has been the creation of a new self service document processing module (DPM) that enables ATMs to accept and process a wide range of documents including bills, cheques and giros from almost any country in the world. Considerable technical challenges were faced by AT&T during the development ofthe DPM. Central to this solution is the document processing transaction that requires the payment ATM to accept a document from the consumer and read the relevant information from it so the data can be electronically transacted. This paper describes some of the technical issues and associated solutions that have been developed by AT&T to automate document based payment transactions in a self service terminal.