Teller machines are everywhere…and they could be offering other services without a great deal of alteration.
Today’s invention is to fit each of these machines with an internal cellphone so that it would be possible to insert one’s bank card and use this to pay for a single text message (after entering your normal PIN).
If your phone had run out of power or been lost, this service could bail you out by providing a short, predefined list of names of your friends and family on the screen.
You could select the name(s) you want to contact and one of a number of standard messages eg “I’m at -location of this atm- please collect me.”
This would cause no additional delays in terms of queueing and might act as an extra safety measure for those who have become over-reliant on their mobile technology.
