How to Automate Switch Commerce

An ATM estate is a cash business run at a distance

Switch Commerce is an ATM processing and terminal management platform, run out of Irving, Texas with offices in London, Paris and Dublin. It sits between a cash machine and the card networks, authorising the withdrawal, and hands the operator a terminal management system to run the estate from.

The business underneath is an odd one to describe. An independent operator owns machines that stand in other people's shops, bars, filling stations and hotel lobbies, fills them with cash that is often borrowed, pays the site a commission for the floor space, and earns from a surcharge on each withdrawal and a share of interchange. Nobody from the company is ever standing anywhere near the machine.

Banks and credit unions run the same processing under a different set of pressures, and Switch Commerce builds the Banking Cube for self-service branch banking alongside it.

The route, the carrier and the commission are arranged elsewhere

A terminal that empties on a Saturday night earns nothing until Monday, and almost every part of preventing that happens somewhere other than the processing platform.

The cash has to be ordered from a vault provider or a bank, and the amount is a guess about a weekend nobody can see yet. An armored carrier is given a delivery order, confirms it on their own portal, and occasionally does not. A technician has to be sent when a dispenser jams, and the part comes from a distributor with its own stock page. The site owner wants a commission statement worked out on terms that live in a signed placement agreement in a filing cabinet.

Then the paperwork nobody counts as work. The surcharge notice matching what the screen actually says. Whether the sponsor bank or the network has published something that changes either. Each of those is a login, and a person who remembers which one.

Switch Commerce

Cash orders sized by the site Each terminal's own dispensing history turned into next week's load, so a location that runs dry every payday Friday gets filled for it.

Carrier orders confirmed, not assumed The armored carrier's portal read back for acceptance and a delivery date, with any order that never confirmed listed before the weekend.

Commission checked against the agreement Surcharge and interchange set beside what each site is owed on its own placement terms, so a location that stopped paying shows up this month.

Real-Time Terminal Status answers for the machine, not the money

The platform already does a great deal of this, and an operator keeping a parallel spreadsheet is doing the work twice.

The Terminal Management System covers terminal creation, real-time terminal status across the estate, settlement management and reporting, and the Mobile TMS puts the same view on a phone for whoever is standing in front of the machine. Automated Reversals push a non-dispensed approval back to the cardholder's account without anyone raising a case by hand. The Electronic Journal keeps the transaction record that settles a dispute weeks after it happened. The Vault Cash Program exists so an operator is not tying up their own money inside a few hundred steel boxes, and Dynamic Currency Conversion turns a foreign card into a revenue line.

The common ingredient is the transaction. The platform is authoritative about what a machine did, when it did it and what settled afterwards.

It has no view of the carrier's confirmation, the vault provider's cut-off, the distributor's stock, the commission terms in a placement agreement or the date a site's lease runs out. Those decide whether a terminal is worth keeping, and every one of them lives on another company's website.

A cash order can be built from what each site actually dispensed

The cash order is a guess and the confirmation is on somebody else's portal. Neither has to be held in a person's head.

Next week's load worked out from what each terminal dispensed over the last four weekends, so a site that runs dry every payday Friday is filled for it rather than visited twice. The carrier's portal read back to confirm the order was accepted and when it lands, with anything unconfirmed listed while there is still a working day to fix it.

Faults get the same treatment. A dispenser error checked against the parts distributor's stock page before a technician is dispatched, so nobody drives two hours and then orders a board.

And the money the estate is made of. Surcharge and interchange set against what each location is owed under its own placement terms, so a site that stopped paying for its floor space is visible this month. The sponsor bank's and the network's own bulletins watched for a rule change that touches signage or the surcharge screen.

Reading and comparing can run unattended. Ordering cash, releasing a carrier delivery and paying a site its commission all move real money, so each waits for somebody authorised to approve it.

Nobody grew an estate by re-keying a carrier's confirmation

Friday's order was either accepted or it was not, and only the carrier's portal says which. Checking it keeps landing on the person deciding where the next twenty machines go.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the terminal management system the way your operations team does, opens the carrier's portal, the vault provider's site or a parts distributor beside it, and leaves one list naming the terminal, the number and the exception.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a run can be limited to an explicit list of domains. Cash orders, carrier releases and commission payments are drafted and held for approval.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.