ATM Makers of the World

Nobody has ever built an ATM in one place

Stand at a cash machine and you are looking at a committee. The steel box came from one country. The mechanism that counts the notes came from another. The slot you push your card into was almost certainly made in Nagano prefecture. The keypad came from somewhere else again, and the whole thing was screwed together in a factory that the company on the front does not own.

There are 118 plants on this map, at 105 places. They span two centuries and they have never all been busy at once. Watching them light up and go dark is the quickest way to understand an industry that was invented in three countries at the same time and now rests on a handful of buildings.

First you need a very good safe

Chubb was making locks and safes in Wolverhampton from 1818. Sargent & Greenleaf have been making combination locks since 1857. Diebold was building safes and bank vaults in Canton, Ohio from 1872. NCR started turning out cash registers in Dayton in 1884. Glory's works at Himeji opened in 1918, though it would be another thirty years before it made anything that handled currency.

None of these people were thinking about cash machines. But a strongbox, a lock that cannot be picked, and a mechanism that counts money without being fooled are three quarters of the problem. When the ATM arrived it was not invented out of nothing — it was assembled from Victorian trades that already knew how to keep money safe and count it properly.

Three countries, at once, by accident

In June 1967 Barclays put a machine outside a branch in Enfield that swallowed a paper voucher and paid out ten pounds. Chubb and Smiths Industries had a rival in NatWest branches within a year.

Don Wetzel was standing in a bank queue in North Dallas in 1968, late and annoyed, when it struck him that most of what the teller was doing could be done by a machine. He worked for Docutel, which until then had made automatic baggage handlers for airports. They built the thing in Irving, Texas.

OKI, meanwhile, had shipped a deposit terminal in 1967 and delivered its first cash dispenser to Fuji Bank in December 1970, out of plants at Takasaki and Honjo running since 1958 and 1962, and running still. Three continents, four years, no collaboration at all.

The famous part is the worst documented

Everyone tells the story of the first few machines. Almost nobody can tell you where they were physically made. Chubb's MD2 went into NatWest branches in 1968 and no surviving source names the factory that built it. Wolverhampton is the obvious guess, and a guess is all it is.

By 1973 there were around 2,000 cash machines in America, most of them from Docutel and Diebold. Where Diebold built its share is not recorded either. An industry that now moves trillions of dollars a year left a thinner paper trail in its founding decade than the safe works that came before it.

Everybody builds their own

For about twenty years, the machine in your high street was made in your own trading bloc. Ohio and Dundee supplied the English-speaking world, Paderborn supplied Germany, and Japan's three makers supplied Japan. Selling and building happened in roughly the same place.

Paderborn is the survivor. Nixdorf Computer put up purpose-built halls there in 1974. The sign on the gate has since read Siemens Nixdorf, then Wincor Nixdorf, then Diebold Nixdorf, and the line has never stopped running. Fifty years on it is the longest continuously operating ATM plant anywhere, and the only factory its current owner outright owns.

The bank that built its own

Citibank did something no other bank is known to have done: it built its own cash machines, in its own plant, in Los Angeles, from the late 1970s until it signed with NCR in 1997. It started because buying them was difficult, and carried on long after it wasn't.

In August 1997 the bank signed with NCR and the plant lost its reason to exist. It closed about fifteen months later and at least a hundred people lost their jobs. A Citibank spokesman told the Dayton Daily News: “It's with a little sadness that we do this… There was a time when nobody was interested in building machines for us.”

Source: Dayton Daily News, 29 August 1997

Five thousand seven hundred people, then none

IBM broke ground outside Charlotte in 1978. The plant opened the following year making circuit boards and cash machines, added printers in 1981, and by 1985 employed 5,700 people.

Then it went the way of most American electronics. IBM sold the plant to Solectron in 1998, ending its manufacturing in Charlotte altogether. For two decades IBM was one of the largest ATM makers in the world. Today you would struggle to find anyone who remembers it made them at all, let alone where.

Source: Charlotte Observer, 16 September 1999

Three American lineages, one loading dock

In December 1997 Solectron paid around $100 million for NCR's plants at West Columbia, Atlanta and Dublin. In 1998 it bought IBM's Charlotte electronics plant. In January 2007 it took on NCR's entire Americas ATM production — Dallas, Waterloo, São Paulo — under a five-year contract.

Three separate American ATM lineages end at the same contract manufacturer, and it is not a name most people in the industry would recognise. This is what the end of a national industry actually looks like. Not factories closing. Factories quietly changing hands and keeping the lights on for somebody else.

Source: Contemporary press reports of the December 1997 sale · Charlotte Observer, 16 September 1999

China, six years before anyone noticed

The usual telling has Western ATM makers arriving in China around the time it joined the World Trade Organisation. They were there long before that.

In May 1993 Diebold announced a joint venture in Shanghai — 65% Diebold, 20% Shanghai FarEast Aero-Technology, 15% ICBC, on a thirty-year agreement — and had machines coming off the line before the year was out. GRG Banking, today one of the largest ATM makers on earth, would not exist as an independent company for another six years. NCR's Beijing venture was four years away.

The work leaves

Beijing in 2001. Puducherry in 2002. Budapest in 2005. Then Manaus, Guangzhou, Suzhou. And in May 2009, after sixty-four years, NCR stopped building cash machines in Dundee.

The lines drawn here join an old plant to a newer one under the same owner. Nothing was physically carted from Scotland to Hungary; no crate followed these routes. They show where the work went, which is the only honest way to draw a decision taken in a boardroom.

Sent home at lunchtime

Gustav Mosler founded a safe company in Cincinnati in 1867 and it followed Diebold's arc almost exactly: safes, then vaults, then the whole apparatus of a bank. It built at Hamilton, Ohio for more than a century. The Hamilton plant closed on 2 April 1996, taking about 140 jobs with it.

The company lasted five more years. On 3 August 2001 Mosler liquidated its entire US operation and sent 1,800 people home at lunchtime, around 350 of them at Hamilton. It was 134 years old. Diebold hired as many of them as it could and took over the customer list. It did not take the plant.

Docutel had gone the same way, more quietly. Dallas manufacturing shut in early 1986 and the ATM business went to TRW that October. By January 1991 the machines that started the American industry were being sold by the pound to scrap dealers out of a warehouse in Boca Raton.

Source: Newspaper record of the 1996 plant closure and the 2001 liquidation

Home again, and away again

In late 2009 NCR pulled Americas production back from its contract manufacturers into new plants at Columbus, Georgia and Manaus, Brazil — Columbus part-financed by a $5 million industrial revenue bond from a town glad of the jobs. Within a decade Columbus was closed and the work had gone to a partner in Chihuahua, Mexico.

Diebold Nixdorf ran the same manoeuvre the other way. In 2019 it shut its leased plant in Greensboro and moved North American assembly back to North Canton, into a building from 1967 that it rents. In Greensboro, 122 employees and 86 contractors lost their jobs. In Ohio, about a hundred jobs appeared.

Forty tonnes of steel a day

Almost nobody has described one of these places from the inside. An account of a visit in September 2023 puts it at roughly 2,000 people, forty tonnes of steel coming through the doors daily, robots moving cabinets along a line borrowed from car manufacturing, and about 200 days between an order being placed and a machine arriving.

Two hundred days. The thing you walk up to without a second thought takes most of a year to make, in a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, on a site that has been turning out business machines since before the moon landing.

The country that invented it is down to one company

OKI shipped the first cash-recycling ATM in 1982 — a machine that takes your deposit and pays those same notes out to the next customer, which is why Japanese branches need so few cash deliveries. For forty years three Japanese firms made the recycling and note-handling modules that everyone else's machines were built around.

Omron was bought out of its joint venture with Hitachi in 2021. Fujitsu handed its cash-module business to JCM in 2026. And in March 2026 OKI and Hitachi agreed to merge their ATM operations into a single company from October. Three became one inside five years.

Two factories, four fifths of the world's card slots

The slot you push your card into comes from a company almost nobody outside the industry can name. Nidec Instruments — Sankyo Seiki when it built its first card reader in 1971 — reckons it supplies around 80% of the readers inside the world's cash machines, from a works at Shimosuwa in Nagano and a site in Zhejiang.

Take apart three competing bank machines from three different brands and you will often find the same Japanese reader in all three. It is the narrowest point in the entire machine, and it is two buildings.

What's left

In February 2026 NCR Atleos told its shareholders that its primary internal manufacturing facility is in Chennai, and that it also uses partner facilities in Budapest. Budapest was NCR's own flagship plant until it was sold to a Foxconn subsidiary in 2022. Which leaves one factory the company actually owns and runs.

Diebold Nixdorf has three sites and about 2.7 million square feet, and owns exactly one of them. Atleos's own risk disclosures concede that ATMs themselves “are supplied by single sources,” and decline to name any. Two hundred years after Chubb started making safes in Wolverhampton, the machine that hands you your money rests on a very short list of buildings.