William Friend
Original research

The ATM, taken apart

Twenty years working with these machines, and a long trawl through annual reports, patent files, court records and local newspapers to answer a question the industry mostly cannot: who actually builds a cash machine, and where. Four interactive pieces and a written series, all of it from primary sources.

Orthographic globe with the documented ATM manufacturing sites marked
Interactive · sixteen chapters

ATM Makers of the World

Nobody has ever built a cash machine in one place. Two centuries of manufacturing on a globe that follows the story — Citibank building its own in Los Angeles, IBM in Charlotte, Mosler sending 1,800 people home at lunchtime, and the Japanese triopoly collapsing into one company.

118 plants · 27 countries · 16 chaptersOpen →
Patent drawing of the Docutel currency dispenser cabinet, 1973
Interactive · 3D model

Inside the ATM

Take the machine apart. Orbit a cash machine built at real proportions, pull it into its nine components, and fly into any one of them — where the wireframe dissolves into the actual patent drawing, alongside the companies that really manufacture that part.

9 components · 25 archival drawings and photographsOpen →
Patent figure from the Docutel automatic currency dispenser, granted 1973
Interactive · five generations

The Evolution of the ATM

1967 to now, era by era: what the machines could do, the patents that defined each step, and how every component changed underneath — from single-note mechanical picking to cash recycling and EMV.

1967 — present · patents, products and component tracksOpen →
Patent drawing of a currency dispenser friction picker mechanism
Infographic

Anatomy of a Banknote

The security features built into the note itself — and the ones a cash machine's validator is actually looking for when it decides whether to accept what you just fed it.

Substrate, print, and machine-readable featuresOpen →
The written series

Four parts on attacking and defending cash machines

Written for practitioners, and paired with a technical-risk white paper.

The Evolving ATM Threat Landscape
Part 1 of four — the threat landscape, and the architecture that makes a cash machine vulnerable.
From Skimmers to Sledgehammers
Part 2 — skimming, ram raids and explosive gas: the physical attacks that remain the most common.
Jackpotting, Black Boxes, and State-Sponsored Hackers
Part 3 — the logical attacks, and the compromise of the switch behind the machine.
Building an ATM Defense That Actually Works
Part 4 — a practical framework, scoring risk against the controls you already have.
White paper (PDF) →All writing on the blog →
What sits underneath

None of this comes from a secondary history. It was assembled one plant and one patent at a time, and every claim on every page carries the quote and the document it rests on. Where something could only be established from a vendor or a trade association it is graded down and marked, because in this industry those are marketing documents and they are frequently wrong about their own past.

545
patent documents, with figures and metadata
649
archived sources with provenance
118
manufacturing sites qualified and evidenced
42
analysis documents behind the pages
1,111
vendor documents harvested and mined
6
component supply chains traced end to end