Mobile and digital payment options continue to expand the payment landscape, but cash usage remains steady, accounting for 14 percent of all consumer payments. These cash payments mostly occur at cash-heavy retailers like grocery stores and gas stations, where secure and efficient cash handling practices are essential.
Over the last few decades, many Cash-in-Transit (CIT) carriers have moved beyond traditional armored transportation to offer end-to-end cash management solutions. Smart safes are among these solutions, providing a modern approach that offers new efficiencies and opportunities for both the carrier and the customer.
Added value
CIT carriers can enhance the customer experience by offering a bundled solution that provides access to a smart safe and provisional credit. Transportation frequency, based on the safe’s capacity and the customer’s typical cash flow, is factored into the package as well. The result is a strategic and cost-effective solution.
With a smart safe package, the CIT carrier bridges a gap between the traditional ways of cash handling and modern automation. The customer has streamlined cash handling and gained new efficiencies like improved working capital and the ability to access real-time reporting.
Moving beyond retail
The ability to streamline cash processing has pushed smart safes beyond retail, into financial institutions that are quickly recognizing the potential to improve their operations and expand their services as well.
Not only can they better manage cash-heavy commercial clients, but smart safes open the door to serving industries that face strict regulatory scrutiny and often very limited access to traditional bank options, like the gaming and cannabis industries. Smart safes offer these industries a banking option that creates the required transparency for compliance and the desperately needed security for the numerous cash transactions.
The ability for smart safes to produce a log of each transaction helps meet compliance requirements while providing access to provisional credit and addressing the many risks of managing large amounts of cash.
Merging physical and digital
A recent report indicates there are roughly 300,000 smart safes in use across the United States, representing roughly 20 percent market penetration. The adoption of smart safes among financial institutions in the United States is not well documented, but global adoption is estimated at 55 percent.
These numbers reinforce that the role of CIT carriers continues to change as more automated cash management solutions appear. CIT carriers must integrate the logistics of physically moving the currency with the digital solutions to create cash management services that provide secure transport with more visibility and flexibility.
