STORES of 7-Eleven in the Philippines will soon have “cash-recycling” automated teller machines (ATMs) by June, allowing buyers to do real-time cash deposits and withdrawals.

Philippine Seven Corp. (PSC), the exclusive franchise holder of 7-Eleven in the country, partnered with PITO AxM Platform Inc. (PAPI), the local unit of Japan banking giant Seven Bank Ltd, to deploy ATMs to the convenience stores.

These ATMs are expected to be in all 7-Eleven stores in the next few years.

“Among the features of the ATMs is a cash recycling function that enables the machines to dispense banknotes deposited by the 7-Eleven stores and customers of PAPI partner banks,” PSC said in a stock exchange disclosure Monday, Feb. 10, 2020.

“All ATM cardholders can benefit from these ATMs 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” it added.

As of end-2019, PSC had a total of 2,864 stores across the Philippines, while Seven Bank had over 25,000 ATMs in its home country.

Seven Bank is a subsidiary of Seven & I Holdings Co. Ltd., the parent company of 7-Eleven Japan, and has been operating since 2001.

“Through PAPI and its partnership with PSC, the Japanese financial institution will be able to bring its range of ATM solutions to the fast-growing Philippine market, its first rollout of recycling ATMs outside Japan,” said PSC.

To recall, plans to put up ATMs in Philippine 7-Eleven stores were already announced by PSC president and chief executive officer Jose Victor Paterno in July last year.

“There has never been a better time to formalize this collaboration than today, as a growing and increasingly digitized economy provides demand for digitizing cash, as the rapid growth in our Cliqq payments business has shown,” he said.

“The payments we take in initially provide a steady supply of cash for ATM customers to withdraw, and we look forward to building other services atop the combined infrastructure of nearly 3,000 stores, recycling ATMs, and six million downloads of our Cliqq app,” Paterno said. (CSL)