Erste Bank Hungary plans to conduct a pilot during which customers may pay utility bills using ATMs, the Budapest-based bank announced April 1.
Erste initially will offer the service on 12 of its nearly 400 Diebold Opteva ATMs, Zoltan Sipos, the bank’s card-management director, said in a statement. The bank did not say how long the pilot would last and what it hoped to learn from it. Bank officials also did not explain what types of utility bills the ATMs would accept during the pilot.
Hungarian utility bills use optical character recognition, which places scanned images of typewritten text into machine-encoded text. Utility customers often pay invoices at local post offices because the customer needs a receipt, which is the bill’s detachable bottom portion.
The ATMs being used in the test are equipped with a module that processes optical character recognition images and prints customer receipts.
Erste Bank Hungary is a subsidiary of Austria’s Erste Bank Group AG.
