NCR says the product was developed in response to increasing rates of card skimming, where criminals attach devices to an ATM in order to record information stored on the card's magnetic strip.

The product also defends against the introduction of card-trapping devices that retain the card in the machine slot. The Fraudulent Device Inhibitor is placed in front of the entrance to the card reader and is designed to prevent a customer from inserting a card into the machine if a trapping device has been attached.

NCR says the product can also be used in conjunction with a new card drive - called jitter - which introduces a stop-start, or jitter motion, designed to distort the magnetic stripe details as they are copied to the rogue reader.

Jeff Lutz, VP, global sales and marketing, NCR’s financial solutions division, says: "We have developed countermeasures to each type of attack, whether it is an attempt to capture card details, to steal the PIN or a physical attack on the ATM in order to steal the card."

Separately, Columbia's Bancafe Bank has teamed up with NCR to introduce fingerprint scanning technology across its network of ATMs, effectively eliminating the need for customers to carry cards.

The new technology enables customers to conduct transactions at the cash mahine by scanning their fingerprint on a reader and entering an ID number.

Bancafe says the biometric ATMs have been installed in rural towns in order to provide financial services to coffee growers, who have been reluctant to open bank accounts.

Scanned fingerprints are stored in a central database. When customers use the ATM, their fingerprint is compared to the centrally-stored image to verify their identity and authorise the transactions.

Nelson Sanchez, commercial director at Bancafe, says: "We initially piloted the biometric scanners on 170 ATMs. Once we were happy with the system in terms of reliability and security, we started rolling it out across the rest of the network and are now three quarters of the way through the process."

The bank says 50% of its customers have signed up for the new technology and it expects this figure to grow as the biometric interface is rolled out across its network.

Bancafe says it is in talks with the national goverment about distributing pension payments via the ATMs.