NCR Atleos CONNECT 2026: EVP/COO Stuart Mackinnon Provides Company Overview in Exclusive Sit-down Interview

By Roy Urrico

Finopotamus was in Orlando as the exclusive media guest at NCR Atleos CONNECT 2026. What follows are highlights from a one-on-one interview with NCR Atleos EVP/COO Stuart Mackinnon. See more feature articles and one-on-one interviews at CONNECT 2026 with NCR Atleos’ executive team under Conference Coverage.

NCR Atleos EVP/COO Stuart Mackinnon.

  “It's an opportunity for us to have the unwavering focus of our customers versus the traditional multi-vendor event,” is how NCR Atleos EVP/COO Stuart Mackinnon summarized his company’s CONNECT 2026, an invitation-only networking and strategy event, held in April, 2026 in Orlando. The annual, multi-tiered conference once again served as a global gathering for some 200 C-suite and banking leaders to discuss and demonstrate banking transformation emerging technologies.

A Concept Car Approach

“When you go through our innovation lab and our digital branch, it's really our litmus test (of) what we're developing for the future,” explained Mackinnon on the thought process behind CONNECT 2026. He explained everything demoed at the event was put together with a small team similar to how the automotive industry develops a concept car. “(When) you go to the auto show, you see the concept car, (but) you are never going to see 80% of the technology in there. But it spurs ideas.”

That is the idea behind putting on a show focused on innovation, he added. “We challenge our engineers. I say, ‘build me something no one's ever seen before.’ If you think of the ATM, it has been the same shape for as long as you can remember. When we build the next generation of devices, this is our opportunity to think outside of that box.”

The State of Retail Delivery Today

NCR Atleos operate in both the banking space and the retail space, explained Mackinnon.

“We sell to financial institutions as we've been doing for 60 years. The company's been around for 140 years, originally selling cash registers. This event (CONNECT 2026) is really focused on the branch of the future, automation of tellers, reduction of cost, cost efficiency, those kinds of things.”

Retailers never buy an ATM from their company, noted Mackinnon. “They buy a service from us, which is, ‘I am going to put a device in your store. And my promise to you is that I will drive more foot traffic through the door because of that device.’”

Mackinnon explained further, “We want to drive an approach where we are convincing them that our retail footprint can deliver bank-grade services (which is the Allpoint Network in the U.S. but branded differently around the world). Then convince the retailer that I am going to share a little less revenue than the other guy, but I am going to drive 30% more-foot traffic through the door. Because every PNC (Bank) cardholder, (for example) when they open up their app to find an ATM near them, they are going to be driven to your store.”

Strategic Pillars

Mackinnon described the company’s strategic pillars “Hey, buy a box and I will show up and fix it when it breaks. That was our model forever,” he noted. “And our retail model, which was ‘give me 4 square feet of space, and I'll give you a $500 check.”

Trying to tie those concepts together has been tremendously well received, admitted Mackinnon. “And particularly by guys who are expanding their presence like Cap One (Capital One Financial Corporation) who have a national customer footprint, but less than a 1,000 ATMs and branches, they need that access. They're one of the largest depositors on our network.”

Chime is their largest issuing customer now in terms of new accounts every month, pointed out Mackinnon. “They use our footprint as their branch infrastructure; they have no branches. If you walk into a Circle K, you will see one of our devices branded as Chime. It looks like a Chime device. That has been an incredible partnership for them,” said Mackinnon. “Because their demographic is more of the Circle K customer demographic.”

Circle K has activated surcharge-free Allpoint ATMs at over 3,500 convenience store locations across 30 states in the U.S. All ATMs offer cash withdrawals and other services and are available to Chime members, according to NCR Atleos.

Cashing In

When Finopotamus asked if people still use ATMs to obtain cash, MacKinnon responded “100%. It is still a tremendously viable business. We operate 80,000 of our own devices around the world, which are basically spitting out cash.” He noted figures vary in different countries. “In the U.S. it is sort of flat to maybe down 1, 1 1/2%. So, it’s a small decline. In places like the UK, it is down 5 or 6%.”

Then you have places like South Africa, Egypt, emerging economies where cash utilization is accelerating because they have been traditionally cash-based economies. “Their governments are trying to build a more stable tax base. And so, to do that, they have essentially said, ‘okay, if you, if you want your government payments, we are no longer paying them in cash. You have to open up a bank account.’”

As a result, those banks within the emerging economies have met a growing demand by installing ATMs. “The customer base, now carded and account-based, as opposed to purely cash, line up at the ATM on payday 100 deep, drain the machine, and go do their commerce in cash. Where (obtaining cash) used to be an over-the-counter transaction, they have now moved it to self-service.”

Driving Innovation

“Certainly, we take all the feedback we can get from our customers about what they think they need from us next,” said Mackinnon. “We've had tremendous response to our as-a-service product (ATMaaS) for customers that don't want to buy the ATM and the software. They just want to call when it is broken and have NCR Atleos run all of the other things around it to make an ATM worked every day,” he continued. “I want to just pay a monthly fee. And you deal with all of that, because it is not my core business.”

How consumers want to use their products is something that registers continually with NCR Atleos. Such as the customer interface. ATMs need to start interacting with all the different interfaces consumers are now using, expressed Mackinnon. “ATMs are almost always the last thing that gets updated because they are expensive. Because they typically stay in the ground five to seven years.”

The digital branch leans into a future that is possible, rather than probable, explained Mackinnon. “However, customers inquire, ‘Is our vision close?’ if not, ‘What do you think is the sort of hybrid steps between here and there from what you do today?’”

Today’s traditional ATM have essentially migrated into financial services kiosks, described Mackinnon. “You can do money transmit with others who provide the services. I'm not a prepaid card company, but you can through our partnership with (CheckFreePay) pay your utility bill if you want.”

For those needing cash, he said: “We have a lot of partners who are looking for cash out. DoorDash pays their drivers daily. And if their drivers want to consume that in cash, they've got to send an ACH, (and) wait a day or two,” said Mackinnon. However, a driver in the DoorDash driver app can request an immediate cash payout. “It connects to us. We will tell (the driver) the nearest device in your location. You show up, we authenticate you through the mobile device. You tell us how much money you want from your daily wages, and we dispense the money.”

Sleepless Nights

When Finoptamus asked what keeps him up, Mackinnon quickly responded “gas prices,” with a laugh, before shifting into “obviously we’re keeping a close eye on digital currency, stablecoin, any of those kinds of things. We participate in that space. We do sell bitcoin on our ATMs today.” However, he questions how stablecoins are regulated. He compared the current digital currency situation to the major boom in consumer card usage that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s—how it was foreseen as a replacement for cash usage. “Well, we're 35 years into cards and we're still got a lot of cash around,” Mackinnon noted.

“So, we look at stablecoins and think about how that will change our business. What do we have to do to be ahead of that from a regulatory standpoint? We lean into compliance because our biggest customers are banks,” he noted. “They are trusting us with generally a $100 million dollar orders, right? And they are trusting us with their customer relationship and how we interact with their customers.”

Safety And Security

Mackinnon also discussed the safety of his 20,000 employees. “Our guys go out and open up a machine that has got $300,000 in it and sit there fixing it, right? We think about how do we make sure our employees are safe every day?”

This includes “employees in the Middle East who are running around in this crisis,” Mackinnon maintained. “There's always something going on somewhere.” He described how in those countries, they’re trying to make sure the devices that their customers need to satisfy their cardholders in cash-driven economies are still up and earning.

In terms of fraud and theft, Mackinnon addressed how NCR Atleos protects ATMs. “I always think the criminals; they have mortgages, they have car payments, they have kids to get through college. They have jobs just like us, just not they have in the way we think of a traditional job. Every day they are putting in an eight-hour day to figure out how to get my money from me,” admitted Mackinnon. “So, we are constantly on the edge.” He suggested one of the benefits of having a global footprint (“we sell in 140 countries”) is perceiving fraudulent attack patterns forming in different parts of the world.

Blasts, Jackpotting and ATMs

NCR Atleos looks at theft in a couple of distinct ways, Mackinnon said. One is physical, “which is (thieves) basically just ramming the ATM or taking a plasma cutter to it, (or) blowing it up in some countries where dynamite is more readily available,” said Mackinnon.

He described how NCR Atleos also must consider the safest methods of construction to withstand attempts to penetrate its structure as well as actual fallout from thieves that succeed.

“It is no longer a steel safe. It is actually steel with concrete in between the layers of metal. It is incredibly heavy now. But it is also blast resistant. We are sort of worried about the cash; but we are more worried about incidental harm to somebody who is nearby,” he added (should someone try to blow up the ATM).

“We have blast containments, we have engineers who just work on expansion bolts and how they interact with concrete as we bolt a machine into the ground, so they cannot be ripped out of the ground,” said Mackinnon. “We think about people like to run into and try to take off the pad and drive away. So that is the physical aspect of it.”

Then there are thieves, he added, that meddle with the ATM’s operation, such as those “who get into the device and then jackpot it,” explained Mackinnon. ATM jackpotting is fraud where criminals install malware or specialized hardware directly into an ATM to force it to dispense cash on command. To this end, in February 2026 the FBI issued an alert after observing  an increase in ATM jackpotting incidents across the U.S. Out of 1,900 ATM jackpotting incidents reported since 2020. More than 700 of them resulted in more than $20 million in losses in just 2025 alone.)

On the topic of AI, and what NCR Atleos is hearing from customers, Mackinnon said, “It is an area where our larger customers are very comfortable. Your Bank of Americas, your Chase. They are on the forefront as well, right? Investing in it, making their development engineers use it, et cetera.”

He continued, “Our smaller customers who make up a large portion of our base are credit unions and small regionals. They need help, they do not have a big IT. They do not have a lot of wherewithal to update their branch infrastructure. Those are the customers we are trying to help with things like the digital branch, which is an entire AI driven branch. Automation, efficiency, security service; those are the areas where we are putting most of our AI investment.”