NATIONAL Commercial Bank Jamaica Limited (NCBJ) and the Bank of Nova Scotia Jamaica Limited (BNSJ), the country’s two largest commercial banks, are currently working to refresh and enhance their ABM (automated banking machine) fleets to meet not only the growing needs of customers, but also move closer to the new ABM standards set by Bank of Jamaica (BOJ).

The two commercial banks control two thirds of the country’s ABM fleet, which serves a population that does at least 80 per cent of transactions in cash. As these two banks, along with other deposit-taking institutions (DTIs), move to handle more cash transactions (deposit and withdrawals) via ABMs, an upgrade in the ABM fleet has been pinned as a crucial step in serving their wide customer base.

“We continue to work on completing the renewal of our ATM fleet and, to date, we have completed 30 per cent of our older models and we plan to complete all the replacements by the end of this year. I’d just like to thank our clients in advance for their patience as we go through this renewal process as it involves taking each ATM offline for a period of about five days. We will see some disruption in service, and this is really because the size and dimensions of the new machines versus the old ones are different so it requires some alteration to our physical location to make these replacements,” explained Perrin Gayle, Scotia Group Jamaica Limited’s head of retail banking and small business, Caribbean North and Central, at the September 9 media briefing on the ABM upgrades.

BOJ’s monthly ABM data for July showed that of the 292 ABMs set up by BNSJ, only 229 were in operation, or an average 78.42 per cent, with the average uptime ranging from 84.1 per cent to 90.5 per cent. This was below BOJ’s 90 per cent minimum for the percentage of ABMs in operation, and below the 95 per cent minimum uptime.

However, the BOJ prefaced this monthly report and stated, “Bank of Nova Scotia Jamaica Limited advises that outages for the month of July were primarily attributed to the impact of the passage of Hurricane Beryl on their ABM network, which resulted in extended outages due to electrical power and telecommunication issues. Consequently, the bank experienced a reduction in the number of ABMs in service and increased average recovery times, relative to the previous month.”

BOJ publishes a monthly ABM performance report on DTIs with ABMs in operation for the public. These reports are published with a two-month lag, which is why the July report was published at the end of September and with the August report to be published at the end of this month. The reports can be found here (
https://boj.org.jm/boj-publications/boj-monthly-reports/).

BNSJ sent out a notice to its clients last month in which it indicated that eight ABMs could be unavailable at several different locations between September 9 – 20 as it upgraded these machines. Audrey Tugwell Henry, Scotia Group president and chief executive officer (CEO), noted that 58 older ABMs would be replaced in its current refresh cycle.

Michael Lee-Chin, chairman of NCB Financial Group Limited (NCBFG), told journalists in Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland, last month that NCBJ would be blanketing the country with ABMs to ensure that Jamaicans have access to financial services. NCBJ had announced in March that it was planning to deploy 50 ABMs where they are most needed economically.

“Overall, when I look at June’s numbers we’re at 98 per cent availability within the peak period so we’ve really been seeing a significant improvement in the fleet. We have 304 machines across the island — almost 60 per cent of which are really in the rural areas — and we’re really focusing on ensuring that we have that availability islandwide to meet our customers’ needs,” said Dannielle Cameron-Duncan, NCB’s vice-president, Payment & Digital Channels Division, at the NCBFG briefing on August 8.

NCBJ itself was stated to have been in compliance with the minimum percentage of ABMs in operation in the Kingston Metropolitan Area for July but was below that figure for other urban areas in St Catherine, St Ann and St James and rural areas. NCBJ’s uptime also varied between 88.3 per cent to 92.5 per cent across the country for July. NCBJ was listed as having 301 ABMs, with 269 ABMs in operation for July.

However, Cameron-Duncan mentioned at the briefing that there was 97 per cent availability for ABMs during the peak periods of 6am – 10pm up to June, and that only 15 ABMs were still out of operation back then following Hurricane Beryl.

Also, the push by NCBJ to blanket the country with ABMs and have a high percentage of ABMs in operation will continue to be affected by theft. A recent story in the
Jamaica Star newspaper noted that the surrounding communities in Duncans, Trelawny, were negatively affected by the theft of an NCBJ ABM in September.

BOJ introduced the new ABM standards in April, and gave DTIs a nine-month window to fully adjust. Those standards, which are a positive for the general public, are set to likely increase operational costs associated with ABMs. Numerous banks have reported a jump in operational costs related to security expenses following last year’s assault on courier companies transporting cash.

The change in Jamaica’s banknotes from cotton to polymer also saw NCBJ only disburse banknotes in denominations of $1,000 and above, while Sagicor Bank Jamaica Limited no longer disburses $100 notes and only disburses in denominations of $500 and above.