Cash is not dead. In the face of rising cashless and contactless payments in recent years, this remains the overwhelming point of view, as shared by a panel of experts convened at December’s Self Service Innovation Summit in Hollywood, Florida: no, cash is not dead.
In fact, cash continues to drive activity across multiple industries, including retail, gaming and entertainment. For millions of people who do not have established credit, cash remains the mainstay for their every day and even less frequent monetary transactions. At Wittenbach, the ongoing proliferation of cash in the marketplace, triggers the need to offer our customers the smartest, most innovative Cash Automation and Teller Cash Recycler (TCR) products.
What does Cash Automation mean?
According to Fin Ledger, cash automation refers to tools that optimize cash handling operations. Since each bank and credit union branch strives to provide a rich and satisfying customer experience, cash automation within the branch remains a priority. One cash automation tool is the TCR.
What is a TCR?
“A TCR combines a bill counter, a small storage vault, and an ATM-like cash dispenser. The latest designs are incredibly accurate for counting even old or damaged bills and can detect counterfeits easily.”
– Hyosung Innovue
With a TCR, tellers deposit cash into a machine that counts and sorts the bills, then authenticates them. The bills are then stored in an internal vault. The TCR also provides the capability to dispense cash as needed. In essence, the TCR is able to process automated cash transactions for tellers from the cash inventory, including deposits and withdrawals. This allows businesses to have a more accurate count of their cash on hand, as well as reducing human error and the amount of time tellers spend counting money.
More and more varieties of the TCR are in development and continue to enter the North American marketplace. With so many varied needs and models, it can become a daunting challenge to learn about the distinctive benefits offered and discern which products suit your organization’s needs. At Wittenbach, we understand how important it is to be sure about which model, features, and benefits make the most sense for your organization and the best investments for true branch transformation. To aid in your team’s decision-making, we’ve broken down the benefits of TCRs to spotlight areas to prioritize, question, and focus below.
The benefits of TCR products are many, including:
- Quickly counting a high volumes of cash
- Accelerating tellers pace of work
- Reducing human error
- Differentiating currency note values
- Detecting bills unfit for circulation due to fraud or wear
- Utilizing new technologies, such as UV detection or a magnetic sensor, to sort and “reject”
- Counting and discerning currency
- Storing sorted cash to be later redistributed, or “recycled”
- Accelerating cash transactions at the counter
- Enhancing staff productivity
- Reducing customer queues
- Reducing intra-day vault buys and sells
- Lessening start and end of day balancing
Specific questions you will want to answer as you prepare to evaluate TCR options include:
- Volume of transactions
- Average number of bills per transaction
- Ease of integration with your existing systems
- Innovations most important for your organization, such as counterfeit detection, as discussed in this blog post
- Storage size; size of the overall machine
Partner spotlight on Hyosung Innovue
We are delighted to offer Hyosung Innovue as our premier cash automation partner, featuring their industry-leading TCR product line. Hyosung is the fastest-growing TCR provider in the United States, serving a wide variety of financial institutions including three of America’s five largest banks.
As our partnership Hyosung Innovue continues to strengthen, we see greater alignment across a myriad of shared values. These include solving customers’ problems with elegance and ease, world-class customer service, and the ongoing pursuit to provide solutions to the ever-changing challenges that our customers face.
In terms of Hyosung Innovue’s TCR products, their technology takes all of the guesswork out of accounting and provides automated and accurate reporting that details cash on hand at any given moment.
Hyosung’s MS500EL is designed as the entry-level TCR model for financial institutions seeking the most reliable, smaller capacity, and proven cash recycling technology to maximize their return on investment.
The MS500EL streamlines cashier productivity with TCR functionality previously unavailable in its class, leveraging the latest in TCR technology; 7 stacked cassettes; 8 notes per second and 200 notes per transaction, and 8500 note capacity, that’s perfect for smaller branches or businesses; with the security of Windows 10. It is the industry’s most advanced entry level TCR, featuring a 7’’ touch screen display, and now, add-On Technologies DynCorp integration.
These and many more features are designed to make the life of a teller much more productive all while staying within a smaller branch or business’ limited budget.
Click here for more information about the Hyosung MS500EL
The MS500 is Hyosung’s premier TCR, and the only one on the market that self-audits in 30 minutes, enabling tellers to load and remove cash without opening the safe. The MS500 actually reduces cash exposure, one of many clear advantages over the prior TCR market leaders. Along with its proprietary self-auditing feature, the MS500 boasts an overall efficient cost investment profile, with an extensive core integration list, strikingly more attractive in comparison to the hefty price tag and limits offered by previously popular TCRs.
Moreover, the MS500 offers incredible capacity and speed – High capacity: 14,000 notes or $275,000 – perfect for larger retail bank locations and big box stores. And of course, the security profile that comes with Microsoft Windows 10 core, a 7 cassette capacity, 7” LCD touchscreen and a secure external transit cassette that is interchangeable with the coordinating ATMs.
These features help your team to reduce the cash inventory by an average of 20% and save your tellers time. With the MS500, tellers take deposits directly to the TCR, allowing your TCR to become an automated vault.
For these reasons and more, we are proud to present for consideration, Hyosung’s MS500 as the best investment to complete your branch transformation project.
Click here for more information about the Hyosung MS500
Other Cash Automation Solutions
Cash Discriminators
We looked for a partner in Cash Discriminators that would streamline cash processing, making it faster, easier, and more accurate regardless of bill condition. We were delighted to learn about The Cassida Pro Series Zeus Currency Discriminator, because Zeus was developed to move cash discrimination forward. The Zeus streamlines cash processing; making it faster, easier and more accurate regardless of bill condition. Zeus has the leading-edge bill recognition, unsurpassed counterfeit detection, and minimalistic machine design all driven by an extremely intuitive user interface, defining a new dawn in currency discrimination. Some of Zeus’s distinctive features include:
- LCD screen with user-configurable color settings
- Keyboard has hot keys for faster mode changes, less scrolling
- Strap by number
- Strap by denomination
- Count detail screen shows value and count by denomination
- Reject screen identifies reason for reject
Cassida Pro Series Apollo Currency Discriminator
The Cassida Pro Series Apollo packs all of the power of the Zeus in a new, more affordable one-pocket platform. Apollo boasts the same superior bill recognition technology, superior counterfeit detection, information-rich reporting and friendly user interface for which the Cassida Pro Series has become known. Apollo also features a convenient storage shelf that’s the perfect place to store batch bands, pens and more.
In summary
Cash is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable future. As long as cash remains a part of our economy, the need to sort, track and automate cash handling will likewise remain a priority for the livelihood of our branches and world-class customer experience. Contact Wittenbach today; let our experts help improve your branch security and efficiency, or discuss Hyosung Innovue and the ways we can help facilitate true branch transformation together.
