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A look at the history of retail banking technology-and where it's going.
Almost all advances in retail banking within the past century or two owe their existence to a leap forward in technology. Think bout the ATM, which amazed the world when it appeared in a London suburb in the 1960s. Or mobile point-of-sale devices, which allow micro-vendors to turn hobbies into going concerns. ? "Technology is everything," says George Bassous, CEO and CTO for Affirmative Technologies, a payments technology provider based in Palm Harbor, Fla. He identifies real-time payments as the latest technological innovation poised to shake up retail banking-and the whole commercial sector. And yet a paradigm shift of this magnitude relies on a chain of smaller advances, ranging from improved core processing to tokenization and ever-more-reliable network security. ? Staying abreast of the latest technologies is a "huge challenge," because, "for most bankers, technology isn't their primary job," says Mike Brent, vice president, marketing at FiNet, a payment processing solutions provider in Boardman, Ohio. ? The timeline on the next few pages captures some of the upheavals bankers have already encountered-and hints at even more seismic changes to come. "Within the last five years, we've seen an influx of new technology such as we've never seen before," says Brent. "And the advances are going to continue to come quickly."
1836
PNEUMATIC CAPSULE TRANSPORTATION
With the invention of a pneumatic capsule system for transporting objects through tubes in 1836, Scottish engineer and inventor William Murdoch spawned a new technology in search of an application. Pneumatic capsules were first used for transmitting telegrams, but when the automobile age dawned, American banks embraced the invention so customers could withdraw money and make deposits without leaving their cars. Arguably, drive-up teller windows were the beginning of a shift in branch design that accelerated after the arrival of cash automation technologies, says Anthony Burnett, customer experience director for Level5, a custom design-build and construction company for banks and credit unions. Gone are the days when all of the customer-facing people in a bank branch "interact with the customer across three feet of mahogany," he says.
1950
THE CREDIT CARD
In 1950, Diners Club introduced the first universal credit card, a portable payment solution that could be...