chennai banks are now more keen on expanding their points of sale pos network rather than atms due to the governments focus on digital transactions after demonetisation and lower amounts of cash in circulations according to rbi data banks have increased pos machines by 95 this august to nearly 29 lakh from last year in comparison the number of atms has only increased 25 to 22 lakh machines for pos makers this has led to a boom in business while atm expansion can be weighed down by expense of the machine and rentals of real estate space pos networks are a lot cheaper with lower maintenance costs the new mpos and digital pos machines average rs 15007000 and are easy to use says pradeep oommen ceo bijlipay bijlipay also said that it has seen more demand for its swipe4cash mini atm facility for rural networks that have a low penetration of atms this can be used by merchants to dispense cash merchantsbusiness correspondents are then reimbursed by the banks for the cash doled out all our machines are bharat qr code upienabled and will soon be on the aadhaarenabled payment system aeps says oommenwith the cost per machine for atms being anywhere in the rs 15 lakh range depending on the features and capabilities banks are finding that their investments in an atm network are not justifying the returns and costs involved parthasarathi mukherjee ceo of lvb which has about 981 atms in its network says we have decided to go slow on our atm expansion plans as we need to check the viability for further expansion we would need to have sufficient volumes to justify the cost and volumes have gone down year over year rbi data shows that transaction volumes of debit cards at atms have dipped 53 to 716 million this august from 757 million for the same period last year debit card usage at pos terminals has more than doubled to 265 million in august 2017 from 131 million last yearpos transactions are also eating into debit card usage volumes this august atm transaction volumes formed 73 of total debit card usage with the remainder 27 coming from pos usage last august atm transactions formed 85 of total volumes with only 15 at pos