HQ location: Canton, Ohio
Number of employees: 16,000
Thomas Swidarski, Chief Executive
Diebold is making subtle, but big, moves in its technology and business. It's concentrating on the wires and networks, the guts that make ATMs work.
The North Canton, Ohio, company is hoping to create predictive models for automated teller machine operators that will allow them to predict which machines on their roster will fail next.
To that end, Diebold has already unveiled OpteView Resolve, a major play in the ATM innovation battle toward offering remote access maintenance and analysis for repair, updating and troubleshooting.
The system diagnoses the machines and allows the bank to repair them remotely, avoiding excessive downtime and saving the cost and time of having a maintenance worker service the machines.
The initial launch of the software was in March.
"If I had to pick one single thing, it would be OpteView Resolve," says Thomas W. Swidarski, Diebold's chief executive, of his company's biggest innovation of the year. "We have received pretty big kudos in the marketplace for this platform."
Diebold is also adopting emerging cost-cutting technology architectures. The vendor is using what it refers to as cloud computing technology to centralize its ATMs' computing power, thereby improving security and further cutting ATM maintenance costs for clients.
The virtualization technology uses the principles of cloud computing: Instead of having individual hard drives, each ATM in a fleet is operated by a remote data center and all changes, upgrades and patches are handled centrally.
Swidarski also hints at the future for his firm's tech efforts—a mobile switch for consumers' debit cards that takes advantage of consumers' increasing comfort with using mobile devices for all manner of commerce, as well as providing security for mobile-enabled ATM innovation.
The technology, called card lock, is part of Diebold's MobiTransact mobile banking platform. "Basically, it's a mobile application to allow you to manage your card from your mobile device," he says. "In other words, turn your card on and off to address and combat fraud."
The security system, which the tech firm says one bank is testing, has the potential to make stolen card data less valuable, since a card would work for payments or cash withdrawals only when the legitimate customer permits it to — a crook that stole a card or a dishonest person who found a lost card would have less ability to use that card for theft or to make fraudulent transactions.
The level of protection is also user-driven. Consumers would have the flexibility to keep a card switched off at almost all times — or to lock it only in high-risk situations, such as when it has been misplaced.
Diebold would not say which bank is testing card lock, which it provides through mobile browsers or text messages. The company plans to officially launch card lock later this year.
