Automated Cash Handling Seems Like the Way to Go

Credit and debit cards may have found many takers but cash remains the king.

Because that's what the stats suggest. Even today transactions in currency

notes amount to a whopping 1 billion per day. A rise in the supply and demand

of cash is accompanied by a simultaneous growth in the expenditures pertaining

to cash management. Financial institutions have to bear the brunt of this

phenomenon more than anyone else as cash handling and cash protection are

their primary responsibilities.

Traditional cash handling methods full of loopholes

Traditional cash handling methods have now become obsolete, repetitive, time

consuming and insecure. Naturally, they are playing a key role in inflating cash

management costs and making cash, in general, vulnerable to shrinkage, theft

and accounting errors. Manual handling of cash is undoubtedly the prime factor

in making cash management both a risky as well as a costly affair. Even today

cash changes hands several times before it is deposited safely in one place.

If you are unaware of how many times cash counting is done in bank, do an

inquiry or spend a day at any of the nearest branch and what you witness will

surely leave you in shock. Many a time, cash has to be counted not just once

but twice. Double counting is common when ATMs are refilled or when an

armored carrier arrives at a bank's doorstep to pick up large volumes of cash

and transfer them to some other place.

Cash management proving to be a costly affair

In US alone, yearly cash management costs sum up to 73 billion and when the

bigger picture is taken into account, we discover that the world is spending nearly

$300 billion to manage the cash that it would be using later. It's really an alarming

situation, isn't it? A solution needs to be found out urgently and there seems to

be just one way out. It's high time cash handling became completely automated.

Many leading industries like restaurants, hotels, casinos, convenience stores,

amusement parks etc. have already started using automated cash handling

safes and this practice must soon be emulated on a large scale. Automation

does not just help reduce cash handling expenses, it ends up optimizing an

entire cash cycle.

What is a cash cycle at the end of a day? It's a kind of delivery & value chain

that has just one main objective that the right cash amount must reach the right

place at the right time through the use of minimal number of resources. And it

will be just ideal if the staff employed for counting and sorting out cash are

relieved of their duties and engaged in other productive activities like sales,

research etc.

A new phenomenon by the name of closed cash cycle has now emerged in the

retail banking arena. What it has done is that it has automated the cash cycle in

such a way that cash gets exchanged at different cash points without any manual

handling or interference. The other advantage offered by closed cash cycle is

that it helps in successfully warding off threats like theft, robbery, manipulation

by employees, inventory discrepancies etc.

Automated cash handling is the order of the day

Automated cash handling is definitely the order of the day. Nothing so far has

given greater assurance vis-à-vis data transfer and audit compliance. What's

more, automated cash handling has even facilitated cash exchange between the

different branches of a bank. Everything becomes so systematic that you get

every bit of information with ease. The value of the cash present in a cassette,

the dates on which the cash was used, and the different paths that it took can all

be found out easily.

Cash was, is and probably will remain in use forever. That you can say is a

certainty. But the need of the hour is that cash management must be optimized.

A combination of innovative hardware and equally effective software can allow

banks to revolutionize their cash cycle management. The cash streams involving

banks and their commercial customers too must be managed intelligently.

As far as complete automation of cash cycles is concerned, it certainly won't

happen overnight. But let banks do it gradually and they may soon start to reap

huge benefits. The entire process can be kick-started with the use of automated

cash handling safes and when the benefits of this initiative start to become

apparent, automation would then seem like the only way to go.