Blog: Cash management - retail’s boring revolution

With a prime spot at the biggest retail showcase in the world, astoundingly some exhibitors were presenting the mundane and unattractive. In a sea of glamorous assistants, the latest innovations and multi-million pound stands, were these people super-brave or super-crazy?

For those that noticed this trend, you can say: “I was there when the revolution started.” For those who let it slip by unnoticed or didn’t make the trip across the pond, I’m prepared to let you in on the secret. Amongst all the glitz and glamour there was a tribe of at least five or six brave suppliers, big and small, all demonstrating the latest ‘innovations’ in cash management.

I’m not entirely sure if it is being led by the growth of mobile in the store, a need to make the store as efficient as possible or loss prevention improvements but a cash management revolution is coming. Automation is the name of the game – automated cash counter devices are in, in a big way.

What these devices do is take money in (and it can be directly from the customer), automatically count and issue the appropriate change and then perform all your cash management for you – so no cash lifts, no banking, no z or x reads – your new cash management friend will automatically prepare the money ready to be taken direct to the bank. No one in your store will ever have to touch cash again. All those complex processes, all those Loss Prevention worries, all the time it takes your store staff – all taken out of the equation by a machine.

For the retailer it becomes an interesting thought – as you are not touching the money, you could get agreement with your bank that when the money is in the device it’s as good as banked therefore you could start earning interest on it at that point?

That’s not all; these devices also help you with your mobile POS processes. Anyone who has a mobile POS in their store will soon realise that the first time someone wants to pay cash, you have a problem. What do you do with the cash? Do you have to take the customer to the till, bypassing your fancy new iPad in the process? Are you resorting to a bum-bag?

Many of the devices on show could help solve that challenge. When a customer wants to pay cash, you walk them to the cash device, conveniently situated within the store, pay the money in and are given the correct change.

There’s nothing new here; we’ve seen these cash management devices hang around the fringes of the mainstream for some time now but my feel from NRF is that 2013 and the changes enforced by mobile technology mean this could well be their moment.

The downside is that, in the main, these devices are big and deeply unattractive. If you had one in your store you’d be so ashamed of it that you’d want to hide it as far away from customers as possible. It would immediately distract from anything your visual merchandisers could do to make the rest of the store look uber-cool. To be truly adopted, these machines will need a makeover to become slick and sharp, matching the new mobile technology that’s being installed along the high street.

Maybe in a year’s time we’ll look back and laugh at the prospect but devices that take the pain out of potentially the most complex in-store process, eliminate store loss and enhance the Assisted Service capability can only be a good thing.

Thank you for your patience while I got that out of my system. I promise, the next time I blog we’ll be discussing something far more exciting – maybe receipt paper, innovation in scanner technology or the latest PCI policies. I bet you can’t wait.