The end of cash isn’t exactly here, and some places still need it. That’s not something a phone can help with… or is it?
A really interesting initiative of ANZ is rolling out this week, and it’s one that could help you at a store that doesn’t take your smartphone payments, or even donating a few bucks for charity to a person on the street who won’t have a tap and pay system in the box strapped to their body.
The bank that has given access to pretty much every digital wallet platform in Australia is now linking those platforms to its ATMs, and granting permission to let you pull money out of an ATM using only that smart device, no card needed.
That means if you’re an ANZ customer, you may not need to take that ATM card out again, or at least for a while, as you can now use a smartphone or wearable as a payment device, and even use it to pull money out from an ATM when you can’t.
The technology works with all of the digital wallet platforms ANZ supports, which is all of them:
- Apple Pay (for the Apple iPhone and Apple Watch)
- Samsung Pay (for Samsung phones and wearables)
- Google Pay (for supported Android phones, tablets, and wearables with NFC)
- Garmin Pay (for Garmin’s wearables), and
- Fitbit Pay (for Fitbit’s smartwatches)
Interestingly, it also means folks with pretty much any supported phone or wearable can not only pull out money at an ANZ ATM, but do other activities there, too, such as changing a PIN, checking account balance, doing transfers, and depositing money at one of ANZ’s “Smart ATMs”.
“With the high adoption rates of contactless payments in Australia, our customers will be some of the first in the world to use their mobile devices to withdraw cash in addition to making payments,” said Kath Bray, Customer Engagement Lead at ANZ.
“We know this is something our customers will appreciate,” she said.
We’ve not heard if other banks will follow, though given ANZ’s lead in smart wallet platforms, we can’t imagine why others wouldn’t.
Some of them, anyway. Others are still lagging behind on even the basic digital wallet support of a popular smartphone payment platform, any popular smartphone payment platform. St George, we’re looking at you.
