Empirical Determination and Evaluation of Factors that Impact ATM Placement

ATM is an essential banking service that is used by banks to provide 24*7 banking operations. This purpose can be better served if the ATM locations are optimized for better coverage in a geographical area. The problem of ATM location is further complicated as customers of one bank can use their debit cards at any other bank ATMs. While this might attract charges, some banks often refund these charges to attract customers. Banks need to have a mechanism to quantitatively measure the benefits of managing their own ATM versus paying for fees to another bank's ATM. This can only be done through an appropriate optimizing function. The ability to arrive at such a function can in turn only be done by knowing the factors that influence ATM usage. In this work we conduct an empirical study to establish the benefits of customizing ATM location based on the preferences expressed by people living in a service area. The necessary data for evaluation was obtained through an online survey. The online responses were analyzed using MATLAB. The analysis helped us to qualitatively evaluate people's preferences for ATM usage and thus empirically verify that ATMs placed as per the people's references outperformed in terms of usage.