Jeff Colbourne
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jul 29/98) - A new breed of automated tellers has hit the city and it's hungry for your hard-earned dollar.

Every time you feed your card into the machine it charges a user convenience fee of $1.25 plus what you pay your bank for using an ATM outside its own network.

For instance, if you are a Royal Bank customer with a debit card and use a private ATM, you'll pay $1.25 to Royal Bank for not using a Royal Bank machine and $1.25 for the convenience of the ATM.

A new, private ATM has been installed in the Yellowknife Inn Mall near the Mackenzie Lounge, where the Royal Bank cash machine once sat.

"We are the approved official ATM supplier for the Alberta/NWT Hotel Association. When we became that official supplier the Yellowknife Inn had contacted us and indicated that they were interested in the ATM so that's how they got it," said Susan Gallacher, vice president of DirectCash ATM out of Calgary.

DirectCash ATM has 150 ATMs coast to coast, mostly in remote areas like in Northern Alberta and now in Yellowknife. These ATMs called "white label ATMs" are not associated with any banks. The one at the Yellowknife Inn is owned by the hotel but settlement of the funds is done through the Bank of Montreal.

Gallacher hopes to have more ATMs sold and installed in the NWT.

"We are very interested in expanding further up North. We've had a lot of success in some of the smaller remote communities and we are looking to expand up in that area," said Gallacher.

For those who want to buy an ATM, there is an option for a maintenance package. An armoured car service could put them in or the business can do it themselves.

The whole reason private ATMs came into being is that in 1996 the competition bureau forced Interac to open itself up to non-financial institutions.

It also permitted surcharging, charging a convenience fee at ATMs in 1996.

There are over 15,000 ATMs like the ones DirectCash is selling in the United States.

The private ATMs are less expensive to buy and maintain than bank ATMs, she said.

"The banks require a very, very high transaction volume to maintain their ATM whereas we would require lower transaction volume. So we're going to a lot of locations where banks just can't economically justify to go in," she added.

Bank ATMs cost about $50,000 each. DirectCash ATMs cost about $14,000 to buy.