Will They or Won’t They?

Many ATM upgrade plans are pending deadlines regarding the Triple DES (Data Encryption Standard) guidelines and the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Ideally, banks would want to schedule the upgrades at the same time. Tackling Triple DES and voice guidance separately adds to the total cost, if only because it means multiple trips by a technician to a particular location. “Every time someone is out there, the meter is running,” says Michele Mullee, a senior vice president for ATM channel management with Cleveland-based KeyCorp.

The implementation date for the Triple DES guidelines has already been pushed back from 2002 to either April 2005 or December 2005, depending on the processing network involved, and could well be pushed back again.

“Given the number of times that both Plus and Cirrus have changed the date, they may give us more time,” speculates Stephen F. Russell, vice president for electronic delivery at Webster Financial Corp. in Waterbury, Conn.

Even murkier are the ADA requirements regarding access by the blind. The l991 regulation simply states that ATM “instructions and all information for use shall be accessible to and independently useable by persons with vision impairment.” This requires ATM owners to upgrade their machines now, attorneys representing advocacy groups say, though their interpretation has never been held up in court. While the regulation don’t suggest any particular method of achieving accessibility, advocates for the blind say voice guidance systems would certainly work.

Guidelines issued in July by the Access Board explicitly state that teller machines must be voice-enabled and that sound must be delivered through headphones or some other device that gives a blind user the same privacy that other users have. But these regs must be reviewed and approved by the Department of Justice, which Access Board spokesman Dave Yanchulis says could take another two years. And even then, it’s not clear how the regulations apply to existing machines.

Such uncertainty puts banks in a quandary. They could simply wait for the new guidelines to be finalized, but doing so risks legal action by the advocacy groups. Daniel F. Goldstein, a partner with Brown, Goldstein & Levy LLP in Baltimore, representing the National Federation of the Blind, says he’s already sued ATM owners four times under the 1991 guidelines. Goldstein also says banks tend to settle these suits rather than fight them.

Nessa Feddis, senior federal counsel for the American Bankers Association in Washington D.C., agrees that “it’s risky” for banks to wait for the Justice Department to complete its review of the Access Board’s draft rules, given the threat of lawsuits.