I currently work in a technology lab in financial services. Despite this, we’ve never been able to get our hands on an ATM before. Fortunately for me, someone needed part of our lab setup (the simplest bit – the unrestricted internet access) to demo a new tech that is housed inside an ATM… so they delivered one to my lab and I got to be nosy at the insides and dream of one day stealing lots of money satisfy my curiosity.

First thoughts – ATMs are heavy. Half a tonne of safe, and not a lot of everything else. See the door on this thing?

The cash drawers are interesting to me – they are universal, any money could be in them, so they use a series of movable studs on the back to tell a mechanical reader which notes are loaded (dollars, euros, pounds, test notes, Scottish one pound notes issued by various banks, whichever). Ours has sadly got test money in, which is very deliberately nothing like real money. That’s about all to say about the bottom half – it’s a safe with a feeder to take the money out.

The top half has all the fun stuff in it – the computing power is up top, receipt dispenser and thermal printer on the left (centre as we look), card reader out of sight on the far side, monitor with touchscreen, and the keypad, which is a bit more special than I thought as they encrypt your pin even as you type it – even the cash machine does not know your pin number!

 

Anyway, these limited pics and info is about all I can share, the new device is not shown on them, and we’re under NDA so I can’t say much about it sadly, just thought I’d share some pics of the innards of an ATM, for the permanently curious, like me!