Recently I shared with a younger colleague the magic of the first fax machine I ever had. Where we once had to “Fedex” or mail EVERYTHING, we now had this magic little machine which sat in the corner. It would pipe up and start printing a contract or some urgently needed document from home office.
Faxing became the new way we moved information, and it was awesome in the pre-internet/email/PDF days. Of course, it’s an obsolete technology today, with the advent of faster, cleaner methods.
ATM Electronic Journal has had a similar migration. The original ATM journal was a paper record, retrieved by bank personnel or by a cash handler. This made researching transaction information possible, but cumbersome.
Writing the journal to a 3.5” disk was a great improvement. Electronic banking teams could look up transaction info in a fraction of the time with the handy viewer that was loaded onto a dedicated PC and monitor. Things didn’t always work properly – a batch of bad disks could cause many problems, and the early versions of EJ would overwrite the drive once the info was downloaded.
Moving forward, floppy disks gave way to the thumb drive. This was more reliable but still required daily trips to the ATM to collect it.
Remote EJ is the latest iteration of collecting journal information from ATMs. Some ATM switches offer it. For financial institutions who do not have a reliable method of obtaining electronic journal remotely, QSI offers this as one of our reasonably-priced, RMC-related services. Contact us at sales@qsibanking.com to learn more.
Next month – Screens and marketing campaigns.