Cash machines that follow the street, not last year

Mei runs the cash machine network for one of Shanghai’s largest banks. Her team looks after four hundred machines across the city. Every year she decides which machines to move, using last year’s withdrawals. But streets change fast: a mall opens, a market closes, and a busy machine goes quiet. Moving one costs a small fortune, so a wrong guess hurts twice. With xMap Flows, Mei built Atlas. On the first day of each quarter, Atlas takes the bank’s four hundred machines, counts the shops and restaurants within three hundred metres of each, gives each machine a busy score, picks the quietest twenty, and adds them to the team’s network plan. This quarter, Atlas flagged twenty quiet machines. Six stood on streets where most of the shops had closed. Mei’s team moved those six first, and checked the other fourteen on the ground. Mei stopped moving machines on last year’s numbers. She moves them to where people are.

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