A new focus on digital resilience – and rising costs.
The EU’s Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) provides one instructive example of the many regulatory challenges facing German banks. The drivers of this Act, in force from January 2025, are well understood: to harmonize regulations into a single legal framework; to mitigate IT risks from companies inside the EU, and their suppliers outside; and to provide third-party oversight for systemically significant financial institutions.
While few would argue with these goals, there’s little question that DORA has increased the focus on digital resilience and third-party risk for banks at a time when the cost of providing cash services is increasing. Meanwhile July 2026 figures from the Bundesbank show that use of cash in Germany, while still high compared to other European markets, has declined by over 25% since 2019.
The mission: cut cost and complexity, maintain resilience
While outsourcing can cut the cost of ATM network management, using multiple outsourced vendors will not, by itself, reduce either cost or complexity. As regulatory scrutiny grows, the ability to demonstrate systemic resilience and compliance with regulations are as important to an outsourcing decision as cutting cost and operational workload. Failure to consider regulatory paperwork when outsourcing can increase costs to the point where the economic case for outsourcing diminishes.
One expert partner, many benefits
Rather than relying on a range of providers, banks should consider consolidating their current somewhat fragmented and complex arrangements. As well as reducing compliance costs and paperwork, our experience shows that outsourcing with fewer or one single provider can help banks progressively upgrade their software platforms, ATM terminals and software, all while benefitting from their partner’s team of experts and their up-to-date knowledge.
Furthermore, this approach enables more simplified vendor management, and pricing can be more reliable. Working with one experienced partner to manage ATM operations can simplify vendor management while still allowing banks to retain flexibility across the wider ATM value chain.
At Tieto Banktech, we work with a wide range of ATM customers across Europe. This enables us to adopt a proactive rather than reactive stance to compliance, anticipating regulatory changes instead of responding after the fact. We can also share compliance costs over larger fleets of supported ATM terminals, keeping these costs structurally lower for all our partner banks. Full, real-time visibility of ATM network performance is ensured through MICOS, our proprietary client interface software, to help clients reduce operational complexity.
