Altier Credit Union, a $175 million credit union headquartered in Tempe, Arizona, has turned over operations of its offsite ATMs to Dolphin Debit, the full-service ATM management company.

Altier Credit Union operates five full-service branches in Arizona, with two of them outside the greater Phoenix metro area, in the far northern and northeastern portions of the state. These branches not only provide essential financial services to those outlying communities, but also serve the plant employees of Salt River Project, a major employee group and longstanding financial partner with the credit union.

Dolphin Debit now manages all the ATMs that aren’t adjacent to the five branches. For the credit union, the big problem was the time spent by employees managing the ATM operations at the various offsite ATMs, explained David Skilton, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Altier Credit Union. So Skilton started looking for someone to take over the offsite ATMs.

“I went in search of a company that would manage these for us. When I checked Dolphin Debit, I stopped looking. Their program was right in line with what I was looking for,” Skilton said. Altier Credit Union has turned over management of eight offsite ATMs to Dolphin Debit, a move that has quickly paid off.

“These weren’t high-volume machines, but they seemed to have high-volume problems,” he said. “And because we were dealing with multiple vendors it often meant we had to go out multiple times.”

The savings in employee time has been significant, Skilton emphasized. Now the branch staff can focus once again on member service and not ATM management. They continue to deal only with the on-premise ATMs, and no longer have to go out to remote sites.

“The hybrid approach to ATMs by Altier Credit Union – owning and managing branch located machines but outsourcing management of offsite locations – is a solution that clearly works for them,” said Ben Allen, President of Dolphin Debit. “This is a case where we were able to relieve the biggest pain for a client and allow them to focus on their real mission, not on hassling with far-off ATMs.”