German Savings Bank Installing Large Bunker Ramo Terminal System

Bunker Ramo Corporation's on-line bank terminal system, Bank Control System 90R, has recently been installed by Germany's second largest savings bank, Landesgirokasse Stuttgart, Germany. All 257 offices throughout the German state of Wurttemberg are equipped according to Walter Clark of Bunker Ramo, Trumbell, CT. Some 600 teller work stations have been equipped with keyboard/display terminals, passbook/document printers and bank card readers operating on-line to the bank's mainframe computer in Stuttgart. Each branch is equipped with a control unit for local processing and interfacing with the central computer, handling all standard teller transactions and other banking functions. Installation and service is handled by Bunker Ramo Electronic Data Systems GmbH of Munich, a subsidiary of Bunker Ramo. Landesgirokasse has been a user of on-line electronic data processing systems for more than 10 years and plans to use the advanced Bunker Ramo bank terminal systems throughout the eighties. The bank had a 1979 year-end balance of more than $7.2 billion. The teller communicates with the system through terminal consisting of an alphnumeric keyboard and a 5-inch diagonal CRT display screen. With this unit, the teller can retrieve account information and enter new transaction data. The terminal also controls the passbook/ document printer which is equipped with a dual line matrix printhead that enables OCR-A character printing. The bidirectional 140 character per second printer is said to be much faster than the “daisy wheel” printers usually employed for such high quality printing tasks. The printer also is equipped with a magnetic stripe read-write feature in the document insert slot. This feature provides for the count number to be read from, and the recorded balance to be updated on, the magnetic stripe affixed to the customer's passbook, during transaction processing. Magnetic stripe and coding is per DIN 32744. Also online to the system at each teller station is a bank card reader, initially used for teller identification and planned by the bank for customer use. Customer cards are to be identical to the Eurocheque cards specified for German cash dispenser pools and other interbank transactions. The card's magnetic stripe is coded on Track 3 in accordance with ISO and German DIN standards. There are two types of control units in the systems. Eighty of these units are called PCUS (programmable control units), each with 136KB direct access memory plus 500 KB of auxiliary storage in two floppy disk drives, and a direct on-line connection to the bank's host computer center in Stuttgart. The remaining control units have minimal capacity for storage, but communicate with the system through shared PCUs. All terminals in the system can operate off-line from the host connection if necessary. They handle savings, demand deposit, credit, and currency exchange transactions. In addition, the system is designed to handle decentralized text processing and electronic payment transfers.