Most people shudder at even attempting to balance their checkbooks to the penny each month. So imagine the task of processing 100,000-plus cash transactions each day yet keeping perfect account balances across thousands of customers, including hundreds of financial institutions.

Welcome to an inside look at GardaWorld Cash Services. Across North America, we process US$5 billion in currency every day with the help of more than 3,000 armored vehicles, 200 highly secure transaction centers and thousands of highly trained personnel.

These centers have two primary missions:

• Cash processing: This involves orders for currency and coin by retail customers, using our secure EvenXchange dial-a-delivery service. Financial institutions, including banks, savings and loans, and credit unions, also depend on us to stock the cash and coin in their branches on par for their needs. 

• Deposit processing: This involves counting and reconciling the cash and check deposits we pick up from retail customers. Many use CashLINK, our fully integrated, transaction-to-bank cash management system. Both these services are tied into financial institutions, enabling our customers' accounts to get immediate credit, speeding up their cash flow.

To process all these transactions accurately, GardaWorld uses industrial-strength software called, appropriately enough, Money Manager. It resides on secure, redundant servers, so if a server goes down we can failover to another server immediately.

Inside these centers are small legions of specially trained tellers, who have passed rigorous background checks. Each teller has a touch screen terminal and a currency counter which accurately counts the currency and reports the denomination counts directly to the Money Manager system.

Outsourcing cash management for financial institutions

Among our transaction centers, about 80 serve as cash vaults for financial institutions. In fact, one of the financial industry's biggest trends today is outsourcing cash management to GardaWorld. While most people think that managing cash is a core activity of financial institutions, it may seem ironic that they outsource it. But they do so for many reasons:

• Reduce risk. By having GardaWorld's armored transport services handle their cash deliveries and pickups (and often the stocking of their branch and offsite ATMs, too), financial institutions effectively offload the reputational and bodily harm risk of robbery and loss to us.

• Minimize errors. Our cash vault systems, which integrate counting and reconciliation, help reduce counting mistakes that the financial institutions' own employees can make.

• Higher productivity. More and more financial institutions are realizing that having their employees count cash is a relatively low-value activity when compared with providing superior customer service and selling additional financial services. GardaWorld's core focus is cash management, so it's good economics to turn the counting chores over to us.

• Greater throughput. Our cash vault facilities are optimized for processing high volumes of cash and checks at speeds few financial institutions can match. Faster processing means quicker deposit credits, reconciliations and reporting.

• Resiliency. Our facilities are internetworked and, because we have so many, one facility can do the work of another, if the first becomes inoperable for any reason. Our armored trucks simply take a financial institution's deposits to another site, which may be just 30 or 40 miles away. Again, since Money Manager is an enterprise-wide system, tellers can process the deposits from another branch.

For more information about the many cash logistics services that GardaWorld provides to the financial services industry, please visit our website.

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