BRD, Raiffeisen and BCR to offer 24/7 services
Autor:
Razvan Voican
12.12.2005
Purely symbolic, Citibank introduced the first "intelligent" machines a few years back that allowed payment of bills with cash, but the programme was not expanded.
Therefore even though the major retail banks keep saying the needs of the customers require the presence of an employee to provide advice, the viability of the business model that entails expansion of the standard operations programme to 24 hours is gaining acknowledgement.
Actually, this service category is widespread on the Western markets, and Central Europe also, as an addition to the traditional business hours.
It is mainly about the possibility offered to customers to no longer be tied to a relatively tight schedule for making simple operations such as feeding cash into accounts, paying bills, transferring money from one account to another or viewing card transaction history over a specific period of time.
Such operations cannot be performed at most of the traditional cash dispensers and the machines facilitating them have to be placed in secure locations, unlike ATMs, which most of the times are very exposed. The first to import the model on the domestic market was ING Bank.