Blog: Connected services have arrived

Did you ask Alexa about the weather this morning? Or tell Siri to fire up your breakfast playlist? Perhaps your smartwatch is tracking your activity at this very moment, while your doorbell cam keeps an eye on the home front. “Connected,” IoT devices have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, from home to work to shopping and everywhere in between. In fact, Gartner expects the number of IoT devices globally to reach 25 billion by 2021¹ —that’s nearly four connected devices for every person on the planet!

Commercially, IoT connectivity is nearly as prevalent for a few critically important reasons:
1. Automation drives efficiencies
2. Connectivity gives you visibility to more data
3. Enhanced data capture enables you to make better business decisions

The Power of Connected Services
In the services realm, more connectivity directly correlates with improved service rates—and higher uptime for terminals and devices. Real-time, automated analysis of potential issues is driving predictive maintenance capabilities unlike anything our industry has ever seen. Organizations that have begun to explore the possibilities of connected devices and services have discovered how dramatic the results can be: IoT Analytics found that in 2018, predictive maintenance initiatives saved businesses $17 billion². 
Yet many organizations in the financial industry continue to hold a risk-averse attitude toward cloud-based connectivity. Their most basic security instinct—don’t let the data out of the network!—hampers them from exploring new opportunities to grow their business and reduce costs.

If this sounds familiar, ask yourself: with the right precautions in place,  might something positive happen if I DID supply my monitoring partner with information about my terminals?

Security Comes Standard
Connectivity has come a long way since a soda machine, “the world’s first IoT device,” (according to IBM), started spitting out data (and cold beverages) for Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate students in the early 1980s³.

Today’s devices must operate more privately—and security is a paramount concern for any organization managing data in the cloud.  When Diebold Nixdorf connects a self-service terminal to the cloud (whether public or private), the connection is PCI compliant. It’s fully encrypted and often far better protected from modern threat vectors than data sitting on a laptop.

Equally important, our proprietary monitoring tools ensure no consumer data is ever transferred from the terminal. Powered by DN AllConnect Data Engine?, our services team streams and aggregates system data from a terminal’s internal sensors to take faster, more informed actions that keep your ATMs up and running at the highest levels of availability.

The Old Model is Gone
Ten years ago we could only dream at the technological advancements that have become standard fare for consumers and organizations alike. Modern financial institutions must take advantage of the opportunities that these new innovations offer, and tap into cloud-based connected services that can enable them to continue elevating the consumer experience and driving process efficiencies.

Gone are the reactive service days; we’re moving toward a proactive service model where real-time information enables us to execute diagnostics, conduct remote maintenance tasks and ensure the right tech arrives at the right time, with the right part, to fix a terminal as quickly as possible. Imagine a scenario in which your ATM doesn’t go down—because we’ve fixed the problem before it can affect your terminal. As the only vendor that has fully integrated actionable performance data into the very design of our latest ATMs, DN Series™, we have the capability to access data that can transform your entire network.

Big data, machine learning and IoT were, until relatively recently, buzzwords to throw around at industry events, or worse, their own kind of vaporware. But today, they’re concrete, tried-and-tested approaches that are being applied to make meaningful changes, from the highest-ever end-user availability, to best-in-class customer experience and better opportunities to retain high-value transactions—and it’s not just for enterprise organizations. Whether your financial institution is a local credit union, a regional bank or a global player, this new services connectivity is leveling the playing field, enabling every FI access to the data they need to make better business decisions.

Learn more about DN’s approach to connected services at DieboldNixdorf.com/AllConnect.

This content originally appeared on RBR.