This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1 here.

As an ATM channel manager, you know that your transaction data is a goldmine. With the right monitoring and analytics tools you can access actionable business intelligence such as individual ATM cash levels and locations where you should invest in more machines. You gain operational intelligence—the ability to quickly troubleshoot performance issues and efficiently direct resources to resolve problems before they have a chance to hurt customer experience and bottom-line revenues.

Though knowing about a goldmine is only the first step. Now you need to build your business case to free up budget, and choose the right “mining” tools to manage critical consumer interactions within your ATM and other self-service banking channels.

Building the case: What’s the ROI?

For most banks, the business case for ATM transaction monitoring and analytics boils down to achieving one or more of the following objectives:

1. Earlier detection of transaction failures, slowdowns, or anomalies—improving revenues by catching hundred dollar problems before they become thousand or million dollar catastrophes
2. Faster troubleshooting or investigation of transaction issues—shortening the time between problem identification and normal service level restoration
3. Improved data for business planning—eliminating barriers to understanding business performance to improve customer experience, net promoter scores, discover new product and service opportunities
4. Enhanced visibility into processing environment—eliminating “blind spots” (e.g., performance of network and 3^rd party services)

An example business impact model shows how you can build the case for investment in enhanced ATM channel monitoring:

A bank with 2000 ATMs, performing 6000 transactions a month, and running with 98.5% availability, will still incur 180K failed interactions in a month. Taking an average of “on us” and “off us” transaction revenue of roughly $0.90 a transaction, 180K failed transactions results in $162K a month, or $1.95M a year in lost revenue.

By investing in enhanced transaction monitoring, you can improve your availability and transaction success rates—users of INETCO Insight monitoring and analytics software have achieved 26% fewer failed transactions. Using that number, your bank would see over a $500K lift in revenues from improved ATM channel availability. And this model doesn’t even take into account the benefits of improved customer experience and business intelligence gained through enhanced monitoring and analytics capabilities.

Additional and more thorough example models can be found here.

Panning out your objectives and requirements

Great—your case has been made for investment in transaction data mining tools. Now how do you start evaluating what you really need to maximize your ROI?  By breaking out objectives from when you were building your business case, coming up with your requirements  for a transaction monitoring and analytics system isn’t that daunting.

Every ATM transaction contains nuggets of data, and taken all together, your network is a goldmine of rich operational and business intelligence. The above examples coupled with this even more thorough guide should ensure that you’re well equipped to make the case for, and decide on the right tools to access the gold in them thar hills ATM network.