Last Thursday, Diebold, the ATM company, began piloting mobile authentication for its cash machines.

Rival NCR had the technology in the summer of 2012.

Not that you could immediately tell from all the chest-thumping from the North Canton, Ohio, ATM company.

In a little-watched video interview with American Banker (see below), Andy Mattes, the new CEO of Diebold, gave a glimpse into the flux within the company. Late last year, the company let go around 700 people. (The company’s website says Diebold employs 16,000 today — the company did not reply to our requests for comment and verification by presstime.) Then, earlier this year, Diebold offered up an early retirement program. In all, 40% of the eligible employees took them up on it — “quite a high take rate,” said Mattes, who took over as CEO last June. Again, we could not verify by presstime just how many people “retired” recently at Diebold, but, by the sound of it, it is not a small number. The cumulative savings from these staff reductions is around $150 million, Mattes said. For the sake of context, consider that Diebold had total operating expenses of nearly $3 billion last year.

I bring this up because, despite Mattes’s “we’re innovative” claims, the prevailing sentiment at Diebold seems to be expense reduction. The company lost nearly $120 million last year on almost $2.86 billion of revenue — and still paid out a dividend. (There’s heavy short-selling of the company’s stock, despite its run up in price since the start of 2014.) Yet, the company is trumpeting the new mobile authentication service, as evidenced by this quote from Finextra:

Frank Natoli Jr., chief innovation officer, Diebold, says the firm studied the digital and social habits of today’s younger generation to develop the machine.

“The research led us to choose mobile devices for both the user interface and the authentication vehicle to ensure seamless connectivity between devices,” he says. “Adding mobile wallet capabilities further capitalizes on the mobile mentality of Millennials.”

The “mobile wallet capabilities” are Paydiant’s. The Wellesley, Mass.-based company announced a partnership with Diebold in the summer of 2013. Diebold first announced that it would introduce cardless withdrawals using QR codes in January 2013, about six months later than NCR.

When a company gets “quite a high take rate” for an early retirement program, there are usually three reasons: a) it includes fantastically rich incentives; b) its staff is aged; or c) it isn’t the greatest company to work for. I’ll let you decide which answer is correct.