Dubai: More local banks want to re-purpose existing branches, keeping them for high-value services as they seek to divert the less important transactions to machines, an official at ATM-maker NCR told Gulf News.

NCR, which counts Emirates NBD, RAK Bank, Mashreq Bank as clients, wants to move to the next level in banking by undertaking a transition from a physical channel to a digital channel, in which the ATM-maker sees a big opportunity.

“As branch transformation continues to be a hot topic for all customers, it gives them an opportunity to re-purpose a branch to more higher value services, and migrate transactions from the branch to the ATM. I would expect more banks are thinking how an ATM can play a critical role in moving some of those transactions out of the branch,” Jose Resendiz, vice-president and general manager for Financial Services Solutions at NCR Corporation, told Gulf News at the launch of the NCR SelfServ 80 Series, a new ATM with added features.

“The digitisation of a branch is one of the key priorities for a lot of banks here. They are thinking about empowering the customers along with employees with the right kind of tools and right capabilities,” he said.

In order to fulfil this purpose, NCR has undertaken steps in that direction, and one such is refreshing the ATMs that are there in the country.

“We have re-designed the ATM completely, so that from the user preference perspective what you know you can do over the phone, it’s very similar to what you can do on the ATM,” Resendiz said.

NCR says they it will install four million new ATM machines by 2020.

“We have a number of customers who have already started to deploy in other parts of the world. It’s a just a matter of time before you start seeing new ATM’s here with some financial institutions,” he said.

In all, banks here want to be more like financial technology (fintech) start-ups.

“From a financial institution perspective, there is a hurry to build that innovation culture within the bank to behave like fintech start-ups that are more nimble and leveraging and innovating to build more capabilities, and there is an appetite to think of fintech as partners that can be leveraged to provide new capabilities to customers. It gives us a big opportunity to think, ‘How do we connect our customers?’,” he added.