OUR TAKECash and a SlurpeeThe Motley Fool Take / August 20, 2004
Earlier this week, convenience store king 7-Eleven announced it would be purchasing the ATMs in its stores from American Express in a bid to expand its financial service offering...
....7-Eleven's largest shareowners, retailer Ito Yokado Group and 7-Eleven Japan (Ito Yokado owns most of 7-Eleven Japan).
If you walk through the streets of Tokyo... you'll also come across hundreds of 7-Elevens, each equipped with an IYBank ATM (as you may have guessed, IY stands for Ito Yokado). Japan boasts nearly twice as many 7-Elevens as the States. When you add IYBank's Internet banking to its 9,000 ATMs scattered across Japan, you have a bank that can reach just about everybody in the country.
According to the information provided by Ito Yokado on its website, it took only three years and fewer than 170 employees for IYBank to turn a profit. I'm at a loss to think of another way to roll out a bank with such a large presence so quickly and that achieves profitability so soon....
......a bank that would have more than 5,000 ATMs to give folks fee-free ATM transactions and sell them some gas, a Slurpee, and a bag of chips in one visit. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea.
