We’ve talked before about ATM and the convergence of mobile payments before, so this article on Mobile Payments today recently caught our eye. It shares some interesting insights on the world of ATMs and mobile from the founder of ATMIA, Tom Harper.

ATM technology has been around a long time, and many technologies have come and gone. But as mobile payments continue to grow, it could be said that mobile is a threat to ATMs. Harper’s perspective is that the ATM industry needs to get on board and work with mobile instead of hiding from it. In fact, he goes as far as to say that mobile is not nearly as big a threat to cash from ATMs as it is to credit providers.

Harper’s perspective is welcome one in a world where for mobile payments to be mainstreamed the system between various modalities needs to be seamless. Integration serves all the players in the market as they can benefit from consumer participation versus greater market fragmentation.

The biggest challenge to the market continues to be too many services resulting in customer confusion. And too much choice leads to consumers simply not wanting to take the time to figure it out at all. Hats off to Harper for wanting to lead the ATM market to work closely with mobile.