This Is What the ATM of the Future Looks Like

Your ATM might be about to become an EBK.

JPMorgan Chase’s consumer division, Chase Bank, is in the midst of introducing EBKs, or electronic banking kiosks. Essentially, they’re spiffier, tablet-based versions of the ubiquitous cash-belching machines. Right now, their features are pretty familiar to any ATM user, though the machines can cough up cash in a variety of denominations. (For example in one interaction, you can withdraw a mix of and $10 and $20 bills, if you like.) The machine can also cash a check and give you exact change.

More features, such as biometric scanning (identifying customers by their palm prints), may be in the offing. The kiosks could one day sync to an app on your mobile phone that allows you to withdraw money remotely and have it waiting.

Currently the company has rolled out about 1,000 EBKs in the US with an eye toward adding another 600 by the end of year, a bank official said. EBKs would still represent at fraction of the bank’s more than 20,000 ATMs.

Of course, there’s a solid business case behind boosting the capabilities of ATMs; they’re cheaper than humans. The bank plans to axe 8,000 jobs this year, with a large chunk of those redundancies coming from its mortgage and retail banking business. JPMorgan Chase cut 16,500 in those areas last year.

You can get a glimpse of an EBK in action in this Chase corporate video:

Reprinted with permission from Quartz . The original story can be found here .