TD Canada Trust is investing bucketloads of money in small change.
Last week, Canada’s second-largest bank completed the B.C. rollout of 56 coin-counting machines located primarily in its Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island branches. The move complements the 345 it has thus far been installed across the country over the past few weeks. By year’s end, TD will have 370 available in Canada – a far higher number than any other Canadian bank.
“This is the year of the coin counters,” said Jane Russell, TD Canada Trust’s Pacific region senior vice-president, noting that the latest in-branch investment aims to augment its reputation for customer service following the bank’s rollout of Sunday banking in 2011 and mobile banking in 2010.
“Coin counters are a big advantage and service piece we can have in our branches. In our market research with clients, it was one of the top items they said they would appreciate having available.”
The rollout of the coin counters comes after years of success for TD in attracting new customers in the U.S. Some branches have more than one “Penny Arcade” machine, leading to TD having 1,100 videogame-like machines in 900 branches located from Maine to Florida.
The Canadian coin counters aren’t as flashy. Nevertheless they are state-of-the-art and can quickly sort Canadian coins and separate them from coins in other currencies. Russell couldn’t disclose how much TD has spent in rolling out the new machines, but the sizable investment is aimed at increasing foot traffic of non-TD customers to its growing network of 157 branches in B.C.
Users receive a receipt for the amount that has been sorted in a machine and then obtain their funds from a teller.
“If we get a chance to interact with customers that don’t bank with us, that would be a real advantage and something we’d like to pursue,” said Russell.
TD’s personal banking customers will be able to use the machines for free. Its small-business clients will be charged a 3% fee because of their generally larger volumes of coinage. Non-TD customers will be charged 8%, but that fee would be waived if they opened a new personal TD account.
TD is relatively late in the game in providing coin counters in Canada. BMO Bank of Montreal was the first to provide them in early 2011. Its first B.C. coin counter was installed in a new North Vancouver branch that opened later that year. Since then, BMO has installed 11 machines in B.C. out of 72 across the country.
Several credit unions in B.C. also installed coin-counting machines in 2011, including Vancity, Salmon Arm Savings, Community Savings and Island Savings.
Most other financial institutions began providing the machines as a value-added service for customers to provide some differentiation in B.C.’s fiercely competitive banking industry. But the machines have also brought in a significant amount of additional cash that might otherwise have been left in jars and piggy banks at home.
Island Savings, for example, sorted more than $55,000 in coins in its first month of providing the machines. In 2012, its seven machines brought in more than $1.2 million.
BMO brought in $7 million in 2011 from its machines, which remain free to use for both BMO and non-BMO customers.
Because the penny is being phased out in Canada, the coin-counting machines might eventually lose some of their usefulness. But that could still take years. BMO noted it has collected 145 million pennies ($1.45 million worth) out of an estimated 30 billion in circulation from its coin counters since January 2011.
