BSP conducts ATM information awareness session

In an effort to create more public awareness of its ATM operations, BSP conducted an ATM information awareness session on Tuesday 20th September 2022, with members of the mainstream media in Port Moresby.

BSP Group General Manager for Retail Daniel Faunt said it was important such information be disseminated to update customers on the measures that BSP takes to ensure ATM’s operate efficiently, educate BSP customers and the public and at the same time highlight issues that contribute to ATMs operation downtime.

"We have a total of 326 ATMs across the country. Over the long weekend, we had teams on standby attending to ATMs that were unavailable. At any given time, BSP maintains an uptime at 85 percent of ATMs in operation. We aim to achieve 90 percent ATM uptime but as always we strive to do better,” Mr Faunt said.

"In addition to internally managed issues such as ATM monitoring adequacy, support staff resourcing and software upgrades, there are three main contributing factors to ATM outage or downtime - Power and telecommunication issues, quality of bank notes and card user care. ATM’s are complex, expensive devices and require considerable time effort and resources to manage across the entire BSP network which spans every province in PNG.

BSP Group GM for Retail Daniel Faunt and BSP Payment Switch Channel Support Officer Japhet Warus explain components and functions of ATM.

“Customers are encouraged to adopt digital banking options and move away from using cash. If a customer require cash, they can also utilize BSPs more than 9000 EFTPOS terminals for cashback and over 300 Cash Agencies across PNG that assist with Withdrawals, Deposits and Funds Transfers, “Mr Faunt added.

BSP Deputy Chief Operating Officer with Operations and IT - Guy Thomas said BSP has a team that monitors ATM processing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Mr Thomas added that these teams constantly fix ATMs remotely by resetting them, or physically visit the sites when required for a mechanical issue with any of the hardware componentry.

We refill cash every day at most machines, so the issue is usually mechanical, such as bank notes getting jammed and software failure rather than actually be empty from cash. We are also replacing all the ATMS over the next 18 months with new machines, 120 machines have just been delivered to us, and will be installed once the software testing is completed.”

“BSP customers who have issues can contact BSP Call Centre on 70301212 or 3201212 to report their issues and our team can assist, said Mr Thomas.

Demonstrations on how an ATM operates, its components and functions were highlighted to the press.

Members of the media were also taken to the bank's Cash Distribution Centre as part of the information awareness session.

They were also offered workplace banking services and the opportunity to update their customer details after the ATM information session.