I’m currently working on a body of research about multichannel integration and to be honest, I wasn’t initially thinking about the currency management implications.  I had my head buried (which is the reason you haven’t heard from me lately) in what multichannel actually means these days – technology, customer experience, processes, data management — that kind of thing.

At the same time that I’ve been working on multichannel research, we’ve been talking a lot about the TowerGroup Top 10 which lays out the top business drivers, strategic responses and technology initiatives that banks are focusing on in 2010.  One of the strategic responses that has been on my mind recently is to increase consumer adoption of self-service.  Finally one day the light bulb came on and I started thinking about where currency management fits within both multichannel integration and increasing self-service adoption.

As we migrate consumers to more self-service devices like ATMs and deposit-only kiosks, the branch currency management needs change drastically as well.  In a perfect world, we would migrate all cash from the branch to the self-service device.  In reality, we’re probably reducing the branch cash without entirely eliminating it.

But that reduction can signal significant change within the branch.  As we take in more cash through the self-service devices – whether it’s image deposit ATMs, recyclers or deposit kiosks – what is the inflection point at which the branch obtains its cash from the self-service devices rather than the self-service devices getting their cash from the branch?

I don’t expect that inflection point to come tomorrow but I do think that we owe it to ourselves and to our customers to head toward that goal.