Cash is king again, says NCR

■ Largest ATM maker claims cash usage is getting normal once again

Mumbai, Feb. 8: US- headquartered NCR Corp, which controls nearly half of the ATM market in the country, said on Thursday that cash is coming back into the system and it does not feel threatened by the digitisation drive.

“The cash in the economy is at ` 18 lakh crore, which is back to the pre-demonetisation levels. As cash gets made available, transactions at ATMs are also going up,” the company’s managing director Navroze Dastur told reporters.

“Cash has bounced back as the consumers are going back to the automated teller machines ( ATMs),” he said, adding the demand for cash had dropped “artificially”.

Citing official RBI data, he said transactions per ATM per day and also number of transactions at all the monthly transactions at ATMs are increasing and going back to the pre- demonetisation levels.

He said India can only aspire to be a less cash economy given impediments on infrastructure, technology and application availability, and not a cashless economy.

Successes on the digitisation front are limited to the metros and urban areas, he said, adding that cash continues to rule in the rural ones where the ATMs are used to withdraw subsidy transfers from bank accounts.

He said demonetisation, and the scarcity of cash created because of it, did impact the ATM business. Banks added only about 1,000 new machines in the year to October, but there were replacements of nearly 25,000 machines which helped the industry.

The company’s revenue growth was also supported by the export business, Mr Dastur said, adding that it continued with the 20 per cent growth in the topline to ` 2,500 crore in financial year 2016- 17. He, however, did not disclose the profits from India operations, where it employs over 3,600 people.

When asked if stress on digitisation is an existential threat to the industry, Mr Dastur seemed to reply in the negative and added that it expects demand for both new ATMs as well as replacements from now on, as transactions grow.

He said NCR expects higher demand for new ATMs in rural areas to deepen the network as the direct benefit transfer of the government grows, while in the urban areas it will be a case of replacement demand where smart ATMs should replace the ageing ones.