Jan 13 2018

Mumbai: In a sign of consolidation in the brown-label ATM business, NCR India — an arm of the world’s largest ATM manufacturer — has sold close to 4,000 machines in its portfolio to Electronic Payment & Services (EPS).

Brown-label ATMs are those machines that display the bank’s signage but are owned and operated by managed service providers who recover fees from banks.

Following this deal, EPS will end up with a network of 11,000 ATMs, which it will manage on behalf of banks. According to EPS executive director Sanjay Kapoor, the industry is witnessing consolidation and EPS is well placed to play the role of a consolidator. “While we are a big player in the ATM infrastructure space, we are also in payment processing and solutions as well,” said Kapoor.

“The decision aligns with our vision to focus on software-driven, hardware-enabled growth supported by end-to-end managed services,” said Navroze Dastur, MD, NCR India. “NCR is more focused than ever to innovate and enable the next generation of consumer experiences and productivity gains,” he added. The country has around 2,30,000 ATMs and EPS has around 5% of the ATMs in India deployed for various banks under its portfolio. After demonetisation, ATM deployment has slowed as the shift in currency composition to higher denomination notes has hit transactions. Several lenders are rationalising their ATM networks.