NCR CEO forgets NCR — and Dayton — in ATM column

The chairman and chief executive of NCR Corp. wrote a recent column about the 50th anniversary of the ATM — the automatic teller machine — without mentioning Dayton or even his company, which makes ATMs.

The column (found behind a paywall) ran in Tuesday's print editions of the Wall Street Journal. In it, Nuti explores the ATM's impact on the world.

He might have mentioned Dayton. Or even the company he runs.

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While the ATM was not invented in Dayton, much of the machines’ flexibility and technology that we now take for granted was engineered or at least directed here.

NCR — based in Dayton until 2009 — was often at the forefront of ATM innovations, Ken Justice, PNC Bank’s top ATM executive, said in a recent interview. The company would update the machine’s technology through work in Dayton.

”I think the people that were creating the strategy, determining what the next ATM needed to do, a lot of them were actually here (in Dayton),” Justice said.

Brady Kress, president and chief executive of Dayton History, agreed that much of the evolution of ATMs originated in the Gem City.

In an interview, Kress mentioned the NCR 770, a milestone self-service machine from the mid 1970s. NCR also refined related technologies, such as the magnetic strips used on card readers today, LCD screens and thermal printing paper, all with links to Dayton ingenuity.

“Once the concept was out there and perfected, I think NCR really ran with it,” Kress said.

You wouldn’t know that from Nuti’s column, though. His company’s web site says its “SelfServ” brand ATM “remains the world’s No. 1 ATM brand, with over 650,000 installed globally.”

NCR is now based in Duluth, Ga. In January 2009 — less than six months before NCR announced that it was leaving its then-home of 128 years for Georgia — an NCR spokesman told this news outlet that “Dayton is our headquarters.”

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