Friday, July 11, 2014

ATM deposit scary affair

In Singapore,  making a deposit via ATM is a scary affair. First,  there isn't any identifier other than account numbers. As you know,  numbers are meaningless and prone to error in input;  transferring fund to other peoples' accounts is more challenging. Without names to refer to in the ATM screen during transfer (or deposit) is daunting and scary. 

Why isn't there any info about the account holder's name on ATM? I can think of only one important reason,  i.e. privacy. Anyone can randomly access an account to see the account holder's name,  and keep this info or sell it to third party. How is it going to be misused is out of my guess. 

Well,  I'm not asking the banks to provide full names of account holders on ATM screen. The least they could do is to provide another layer of identifier (e.g. acronyms,  or pet name) so that we can confirm that the numbers punched are the correct ones. Isn't that easy to implement?  

For example an account with these numbers 999-9999-99-9 would be given another identifier "Mr Rabbit K. T. O.", which refers to Mr Rabbit King Tut Orange.

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