Atmosphere

From CATER

We describe several strategies to lower the cost of providing Automated Teller Machine (ATM) microsavings and microcredit services in rural contexts. Microsavings is a growing market in the developing world, but the cost of running a conventional ATM network is prohibitive in many cases due to the capital investment required to deploy networks and the ATM machines themselves.

Our novel contributions are to use the Short Message Service (SMS) over GSM cellular networks which are becoming ubiquitous even in remote areas in conjunction with a system to use approximate consistency and geographical awareness to intelligently distribute available balances among machines to provide high levels of service while simultaneously reducing risk to the financial institution and lowering per-transaction cost. Our results make wide deployment of rural ATM services by financial institutions feasible and economically viable in the near- term using existing commodity technology.

People

Michael Paik
Lakshminarayanan Subramanian

Publications

• Atmosphere: A System for ATM Services in Rural Contexts. Michael Paik, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian. IEEE/ACM Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD),2009 PDF