Beat long queues at ATMs with apps & websites. Are they good?

Deepak KumarMoneycontrolEver since the government in a surprise move froze the circulation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes last week, long waiting lines have become the norm outside ATMs. To be fair, the government has announced a raft of measures intended to ease the pain for the common man. However, one hears no end of snaking queues. Enter apps and websites. A few apps claim they have managed to put people on the right path to a less crowded ATM. But how successful are they?

WalnutWalnut is a mobile app whose primary function is to peek into your bank SMSes and based on the information tracks your expenses and other pending bill payments. After demonetisation, the app is offering a new feature. Explaining the model, Anurag Sinha, Co-founder of Walnut, tells Moneycontrol: "Once someone withdraws money at an ATM, our backend saves the location thanks to the SMS notification one receives from the bank." The app engages the customer in a two-way conversation and requests for a ballpark number of the crowd. This number gets saved in the app, which uses similar information sourced from other users, to alert people as to which ATMs have shorter queues.

This feature on the app is available pan-India, provided people in the smallest towns are also using the app.  "We are getting requests in our servers from small cities as well, but we are getting more activity on our app from big cities like Mumbai and Delhi," says Sinha.

Sinha has observed a positive change in withdrawal activity.

"We have observed the time an ATM is active has increased and have also witnessed the number of ATMs which are active rising. An ATM which would work only for 2-4 hours is now working for more than 10 hours," he says. 

Walnut claims it has seen a whopping 900 percent rise in its app downloads since it launched this feature on Monday.

CashnoCashCashnocash.com, an initiative by Hiree (owned by Quikr), is a similar crowdsourcing website that tells users which ATMs are currently active and gives you a real-time update of how crowded an ATM is. The website went online on Monday.

"We have received overwhelming feedback on our new website. We have around 350,000 people active on our website on an average at all times," says the website Co-founder, Manjunath Talwar.

Talwar says it is best to avoid making an app as it uses up data and does not reach out to everyone. He confirms that the website is also active and running on mobile devices.

Other websites, similar to cashnocash.com, namely Atmsearch.in are also doing their bit in orienting people towards ATMs. CashnoCash also has a list of post offices on its roster which draw lesser crowds.

A Few Negatives But using these platforms have not been a breeze for people. Channel checks reveal that a few of the platforms -- both web and apps -- have given incorrect information. They have crashed, and sometimes proved unresponsive. 

The teams in these platforms, however, are in damage-control mode. 

“The website is currently facing some issues due to the number of active users on the website at one time. But we are hard at work, updating the servers so the website can take the load,” says Talwar of Cashnocash.com.It is a small window of opportunity for these platforms to get their acts together.