Mr. Shir, 29, is a manager of automated teller machine operations at American Express in New York.
Diebold Inc. agreed yesterday to buy the automated teller machine operations and products of Getronics N.V. of the Netherlands and Groupe Bull of France for about $160 million.
It had to solve that particular millennium problem all over again.Similar problems run throughout the bank's operations: tellers' screens, cash machines, computers that oversee corporate lending and collateral.
European banks, which are just now beginning to embrace electronic banking the way banks have in the United States, are increasingly looking to cut costs by moving customers from using full-service branches to using automated teller machines and online banking operations.
This deficient system "functionally financed criminal operations, especially allowing tellers to borrow seed money to run money laundering, gambling or loan sharking operations," the report said.
What ATM machines did for tellers, customers and overall bank operations, companies like leading mobile network provider Telefonica, for example, is doing for tasks like transferring SIM card data to consumers' new phones, reducing a more than 24-hour process into a matter of minutes.
Many elderly people are accustomed to touch screen technology through operation of automated teller machines, and manipulation of this type of screen may be of interest to them.
Automated teller machines, phone transactions and branch operations were not affected.
The high street tellers felt no link to Bob Diamond's casino operations, which the report said had a win-at-all-costs attitude that came to dominate the organisation.
Mr. Scharf soon took over the retail banking operations at the Chicago-based bank, scrapping much-maligned teller fees and opening dozens of new branches and renovating the rest.
