Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

How confident are you in technology? How would you feel about a product that, if it glitches, destroys all of the cash that you’re trying to send to your bank? Wincor-Nixdorf has crafted just such a product. What could possibly go wrong?

The idea is to have a more secure cash drum, one that would destroy all of the money it’s holding if anyone attempts to steal that money. It uses special ink and the vendor says “the money will be stained for more than 20 percent of the surface. It is impossible to undo the staining.”

Can you imagine the fun meeting with your bank or insurance people—or your CFO—and explaining how an IT glitch just destroyed money coming from a store? Wincor-Nixdorf assures IT that “the concept is designed in a way that a mishandling is not possible and, therefore, the risk of mis-triggerings is reduced to a minimum.” A minimum, eh? Quite comforting. Who pays for the lost money if it glitches?

The transport mechanism has two ways of protecting (or destroying) your money: a drum, which moves the money from the POS to the back office in the store and uses a timer to decide if the money is moving too slowly and needs to be obliterated; and a cash cassette, which goes from the back office to the cash center and uses sensors to try and detect unauthorized access.

The idea to add extra security to money transport is a good one, but what if the timer malfunctions? What if an employee gets distracted in mid transport and the timer runs out? It seems a risky—and unusually unforgiving—mechanism. An awful lot is riding on these technology systems, not to mention your employee’s processes, working perfectly. Something about allowing a timer to permanently destroy cash seems like a bad idea.