This ATM Can Do It All: 7-Eleven Reaches out to the Unbanked with Highly Functional Machines. (Tech Topics)
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The retail innovator that gave us Slurpee and Big Gulp soft drinks has decided to get even more creative with its product mix by offering automated banking services beside the snack chips. True, 7-Eleven, with headquarters in Dallas, always offered standard-issue ATMs at its more than 22,000 convenience stores in the U.S., Canada, and 18 other countries and territories. Over-the-counter money order processing services have also been big business, with clerks collectively processing $4.5 billion each year. Now, however, the financial-services menu has expanded with the introduction of web-enabled, Windows 2000 machines in NCR kiosks that can cash checks, automate money orders, or even initiate wire transfers. The advanced feature ATMs have already been placed at 98 retail locations in or near Ft. Myers, Fla., and Austin and Dallas, Tex., with the idea of providing access for all, with a special hand out to the unbanked, people without a banking relationship. Going after this underserved segment was a key part of the strategy. is where 7-Eleven is based and both Texas and south Florida have a large population of foreign workers without banking relationships elsewhere, says Chris Klein, executive vice-president of marketing for Mosaic, Deerfield Beach, Fla. Newer format super stores, which could fit the device easily without limiting retail space, also happened to be located in those areas, notes Klein. The electronic funds transfer (EFT) software developer worked with Dayton, Ohio-based NCR to deploy the industrial grade ATMs on the 7-Eleven project. 7-Eleven also contracted with American Express to be its primary provider of ATM services and Western Union and Certegy to handle check cashing. Eventually, says Klein, 7-Eleven will place nearly 5,000 units in U.S.-based stores. And, with other clients, Mosaic will partner with Stratus, Maynard, Mass., which will power the transactions behind the scenes with its new ftServer. While 7-Eleven will be promoting the concept of ATM-based check cashing in this country for the first time, Mosaic and Stratus hope to encourage a string of fast followers by jointly marketing high-powered devices to a variety of retailers and financial institutions. The latter have to begin to make tough decisions about upgrading their ATM technology to coincide with the sunsetting of the OS/2 operating system and the move to embrace triple-DES standards here in the U.S., according to Mosaic. Traditionally, ATMs have been dumb terminals and making changes on them has been cost prohibitive, says Mike Bengston, vice-president of product strategy for Mosaic. There's also been the sense that banks haven't wanted to incur costs using the web technology that has been out there because they weren't sure about the business case. But requirements are changing, Bengston explains. There are more ATMs than ever, and with that saturation, banks with under-utilized units are incurring costs anyway. Banks also need to think about how to cement bonds with their customers, he adds. Vcom to the rescue For the convenience store, providing fast financial service is viewed as yet another way to create stickiness. The Virtual Commerce unit, as 7-Eleven refers to the device, is a full-service kiosk. It can access both the traditional banking networks and any number of others--including networks of third-party aggregators or retailers--to support e-commerce. It's like an ATM on steroids, says Klein. The device operates as a cash and coin dispenser, but it can also accept tokens, cards, checks, cash, and promotional coupons. Customers can initiate purchases by card or cash. Built with a customer service phone, the device also offers a large touch screen display and full alphanumeric keyboard. As part of the check cashing process, it fires off electronic information to Certegy (formerly Equifax), which runs credit checks on the presenter to automate the risk management aspect of check cashing. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it