Some people love trade shows. Others hate them. No matter your opinion, bank customers always seem to open up at trade shows, making the exhibits a great opportunity for companies like NCR to gather feedback on new products.

This October, we exhibited at the BAI Retail Delivery Show in Chicago. It was a small exhibit for us, but we demoed four products – our new NCR SelfServ 4 financial kiosk, our SelfServ 34 ATM with scalable deposit module, our APTRA Vision management software, and APTRA Interactive Teller.

APTRA Interactive Teller was at our partner uGenius’ booth. If you aren’t familiar with APTRA Interactive Teller, we’ve integrated uGenius’ video banking technology with our SelfServ 32 and 38 ATMs and APTRA software to create a full function ATM with the capabilities of a teller from a remote location.

Customer feedback on this product has been through the roof! It meets a need banks have for expanding branch services into remote locations or extending branch hours via a self-service device.

Here were some of the other things we learned from customers about Interactive Teller at the BAI show:

1)     One customer was excited about being able to expand their branch footprint into Universities. They believe the younger generation will really feel comfortable using the video technology. Interactive Teller would give them a cost-effective way to expand on campus.

2)     Canada loves us. And, honestly, we hadn’t anticipated this. Based on the feedback at BAI, we’ve put Canada on the Interactive Teller development roadmap for Q2 2012.

3)     One customer wanted to be the 1^st to pilot an account opening transaction on the SelfServ 32.

4)     Another customer was excited by the opportunity of having a teller available up to 24/7. They could really see how this would fit into their strategy of offering longer teller availability for a better customer experience but not needing to keep their branches open for longer.

5)     Another customer could see the benefit of lower operating teller costs. By centralizing and migrating low value transactions from the branch teller to self-service.

We are in a very fortunate position that customers are queuing up for our new solution and want to be the first in their country to bring this to market.  What a position to be in – NCR will be the 1^st vendor to bring ATM and video teller capability to market in many countries around the world. There is more demand than you could imagine and the buzz and excitement at BAI was huge. The market is ready for this new technology and customers are ready to use it. If you think about Facebook, Skyping, iPhone-Facetime, ect., Interactive Teller is really coming into the 21^st century.