India's huge but creaking ATM infrastructure is in line for a major overhaul after the country's central bank called on all machines to be migrated from magstripe to EMV chip and PIN.
India has seen its ATM numbers rise from 27,000 in 2007 to nearly 200,000 this year as banks and white label providers build networks in a rush to bring hundreds of millions into the formal banked economy.
The networks are far from ideal, though. This week RBI deputy governor S S Mundra revealed that the bank recently carried out a survey of 4000 machines which found that almost a third were not working and that others breached regulations.
The Reserve Bank is also concerned that ATMs are still magnetic stripe-based, making transactions vulnerable to skimming and therefore card cloning.
This year Indian issuers have to begin issuing EMV chip and PIN cards but while the country's POS terminal infrastructure has been upgraded to accept the new plastic, ATMs have not undergone the same process.
In a statement on its site, the RBI has moved to fix this, telling all banks and white label operators that they are "advised to ensure that all the existing ATMs installed/operated by them are enabled for processing of EMV Chip and PIN cards by September 30, 2017. All new ATMs shall necessarily be enabled for EMV Chip and PIN processing from inception."