The Agony Of ATM Users

When the Nigerian banking sector joined the rest of the world to introduce the use of the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) to bank customers, it was welcome by all, particularly as many believed it would facilitate easy transaction.

However, recent tales concerning its use have indicated that most users experience agony rather than convenience.

Scores of users now find the ATM a big burden to bear. A good number of them have even been known to have fallen victims of scammers who prey on users’ Personal Identification Number (PIN) in order to tamper with their money, especially at the inception of the money-dispensing machine.

Some fraudulent Nigerians are still continuing with the nefarious act where ATMs are located at public places.

Though the banks too have had their own share of these scammers’ antics who fraudulently withdrew from the ATM and the banking halls at the same time, the agony users go through far outweighs theirs.

Many of them had lost good money to the imperfections inherent in the ATM. And the banks are daily inundated with complaints arising from such.

If the banks want their customers to wholly depend on the use of the ATM for banking transactions as they tend to be gradually forcing them to do, the ATM needs to be re-programmed for optimum performance.

A situation where customers’ complaints about ‘mysterious’ disappearance of funds from their accounts are given little or no attention portrays the banks as only interested in ripping off customers of their hard-earned money.

In fact, it is only when both the ATM network provider, Interswitch Nigeria Limited and participating banks come together to fashion out ways for effective administration of the ATM that one can indeed say that the ATM has come to stay and not an agony for users after all.