Lateral Thinking - Fifth Third selecting WeatherMaster ATMs against biggies NCR,Diebold, WINCOR

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I hope all of you must have been purchaser one or the other time. I spend my professional life's first 5 years being a IT Vendor. I learned that, purchasing is difficult than sales. I use to sale my products and often desale my competitiros. Then I became Purchaser for a known bank. I went through the same blues and pinks of purchasing. I consider purchase job more as Marriage. In my last job, I have played three roles - Evaluator and Recommender, Facilitator Manager for Outsourced services, project management. - I think that's like Mariage Planners :>)

It's complex role but, played successfully for Four years and closely looked at decision maker, influncers(Biz. Users) for making decisions. Difficult part in decision making is always being corporate legacy which influence mapping of business requirements against product feature, vendor performance criteria and post sale implementation and sustainance services.

Unhappy Husband: Few ignore the mapping and engage with vendor/product, smile and sign the purchase contract and often seen dejected and avoid eye to eye contact with vendor within first month of enagement.
Run Away Lovers: Others make vendor so unhappy to accept the deal that, either vendor runs away or accepts and deploys sub standard delivery team.

PS: Both of above guys must not marry as marriage results in sure divorce.

Very often, you see a perfect "MADE FOR EACH OTHER" purchase enagement. I come across one recently - Fifth Third purchasing ATMs from Qualtex.

Fifth Third Bank Processing Solutions has certified Qualtex Corporation's through-the-wall, weather-resistant WeatherMaster for processing on its network.

For 145 years, Fifth Third has been providing quality financial products and services to its customers. Based on its rich history of performance and customer service, the Bank has received numerous accolades for the way it operates over 1,000 locations in eight states throughout the Midwest and Florida.

Intresting History of Fifth Third Name:
Fifth Third traces its origins to the Bank of the Ohio Valley, which opened its doors in Cincinnati in 1858. In 1871, that bank was purchased by the Third National Bank. With the turn of the century came the union of the Third National Bank and the Fifth National Bank, and eventually the organization became known as "Fifth Third Bank." Since its beginning, Fifth Third has provided superior customer service and followed sound banking principles.

When such a large bank decides to purchase ATM machine form relatively new company founded in 2001 is little surprise. Answer for the same can be available from gazing at Fifth Third's transaction services and Qualtex's journey through innovative way of product management. Qualtex's leader CEO and Founder - Brad Zerman has interesting pedigree before reaching here.

Let us first gaze at 5/3rd's legacy - Fifth Third Bank Processing Solutions processes more than 9 billion ATM and point-of-sale transactions per year for more than 1,500 financial institutions and 198,000 retail locations. Annually, Fifth Third processes $83 billion in credit card sales.

It is clear that, 5/3 has captured major market share and wants to go deeper by attracting more retailers and low transaction outlets. It is popular to see Rear load model - TTH (Through the Wall) model being famous for such segment of such outlets. Why Qualtex? and why Weather Master? compared to other bigger player's product offering similar models offered by Qualtex.

I can see channel managers, IT procurment Managers and CIO at Fifth Third thinking out of the box.

What are their priorities at present of leading such a mammoth processing services?

Low Cap - Ex (Capital Expenditure)

Low Sustance expanses (Low Opp. Ex.).

• Qualtex ATM has all the features that is required for Retail outlet of ATM and they are in par with what bigger players are providing.
  
• Best feature that can be approciated from product manager's point of view is the WeatherMaster's Highly Modularised and scalable product.
  
• It matches that of typical WINCOR product and can run best terminal softwares like APTRA and Diebold's Aptiva. Why ? Sinple it runs on XP with standard device driver modules which are compatible to any such software.
  
• WeatherMaster has all the three models - Table Top, Lobby as well as TTH with option of add on similar to biggies product line.

Whatelse is needed more than above (for successful marriage) to deploy at typical merchant or retail outlet. This predicts the next wave of expansion coming up from Fifth Third.

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