Diebold Nixdorf
Diebold Nixdorf, Incorporated is an American multinational financial and retail technology company based in North Canton, Ohio. It specializes in the sale, manufacture, installation, and service of self-service transaction systems, point-of-sale terminals, physical security products, and software and related services for global financial, retail, and commercial markets. Diebold Nixdorf has a presence in around 130 countries, and the company employs approximately 23,000 people.
Founded in 1859 in Cincinnati, Ohio as the Diebold Bahmann Safe Company, the company eventually changed its name to Diebold Safe & Lock Company. In 1921, Diebold Safe & Lock Company sold the world's largest commercial bank vault to Detroit National Bank. Diebold has since branched into diverse markets, and is currently the largest provider of ATMs in the United States. Diebold Nixdorf was founded when Diebold Inc. acquired Germany's Wincor Nixdorf in 2016. It is estimated that Wincor Nixdorf controlled about 35 percent of the global ATM market.
On June 1, 2023, Diebold Nixdorf filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, saying it reached an agreement to restructure and reduce its debt by $2.1 billion. Its stock was also delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. In August 2023, Diebold Nixdorf emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and rejoined the NYSE.
Diebold history
Diebold Safe & Lock Company to Diebold, Incorporated (1859-1960s)
Diebold was founded in 1859 in Cincinnati, Ohio as the Diebold Bahmann Safe Company. Under the leadership of founder Charles Diebold, a German immigrant, the company's 250 initial employees began manufacturing safes and bank vaults out of a factory in Canton, Ohio. Diebold states that 878 of its safes protected some of the only undamaged property in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and the following year Diebold moved its operations and headquarters to Canton to meet increased demand. In 1874, Diebold was contracted to build the world's largest safe, to be installed in the San Francisco branch of Wells Fargo. In 1876, after becoming incorporated in Ohio, the company changed its name to Diebold Safe & Lock Company. Diebold secured its first international sale in 1881, when it built a safe for the President of Mexico. Diebold debuted manganese steel doors marketed as TNT-proof in 1890, and in 1921, Diebold sold the world's largest commercial bank vault to Detroit National Bank. Diebold became a publicly traded company in the 1930s. Also around that time, Diebold introduced a "robbery-deterrent system for banks that flooded the bank lobby with tear gas" to help deal with robbers such as the infamous John Dillinger.In 1936, Diebold expanded its product lines by acquiring companies specializing in products such as paper-based filing systems, and it began developing armor plate for military tanks that year. Between 1939 and 1945, Diebold devoted 98 percent of its activities to the war effort. Among other projects, during World War II Diebold employed around 2,900 workers and "sold $65 million in armor plate for more than 36,000 US Army scout cars," particularly the M3 scout car model. In 1943, Diebold Safe & Lock Company changed its name to Diebold, Incorporated, in an effort to reflect the company's increasing diversification of products. The prohibition agent Eliot Ness was on the Diebold board from 1944 until 1951, and in 1952 Raymond Koontz was named Diebold's president, after first joining Diebold as an assistant to the president in 1947. Diebold earned a net income of $1.7 million in 1959.
Computer security and ATMs (1960s-1990s)
On April 27, 1964, Diebold went public on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker symbol. In 1965 Diebold began offering pneumatic tube delivery systems to diverse institutions including banks and post offices. Still involved in safes and vaults, in 1968 the First National Bank of Chicago purchased the world's largest double vault doors from Diebold. Diebold subsequently began offering computer-controlled security and surveillance systems in 1970.Between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, Diebold's annual revenue increased from US$229 million to $451 million. These results were in no small measure the consequence of the successful strategies by Diebold's president Raymond Koontz. In the early 1970s, Koontz began pushing the company into the then-emerging market for automated teller machines. This drive was evident as early as 1966, when Richard Glyer demonstrated a Diebold cash machine prototype at the annual meeting of the American Bankers Association in San Francisco, CA. Then in July 1970, Daniel Maggin, chairman of the board, accompanied Koontz to England with the specific purpose of meeting with Chubb's Managing Director, William E. Randall. Diebold wanted exclusivity to distribute Chubb's cash machines throughout the USA.
The Chubb units, however, were found somewhat disappointing by the US market. After repeated failures and a limited availability of spare parts and service engineers, Diebold's staff and customers thought the Chubb devices did not meet their service expectations. Not surprisingly Diebold finally stopped distributing Chubb devices in 1973 and at the same time, decided to develop and eventually launch its own Total Automatic Banking System 500. This device was developed by Robert W. Clark, Phillip C. Dolsen and Donald E. Kinker, and first installed in 1974.
Diebold's Event Monitoring Center opened in 1985, allowing Diebold to monitor its "ATMs, kiosks, facilities and operations" full-time from a singular facility. Robert Mahoney was appointed company CEO in 1985. Koontz retired as chairman in 1988, although he continued to serve on the board. In 1989, Diebold shipped 12 percent of the world's ATMs sold worldwide. Diebold partnered with IBM on InterBold in 1990, a joint venture chiefly formed to provide self-service products for the financial industry. Under the terms of the joint venture, Diebold marketed their combined ATM lines in the US, while IBM marketed them abroad. By September 1995, Diebold was making over half of the ATMs used in the United States. In 1996, Diebold generated US$1 billion in revenue as a company for the first time in a single year. The InterBold partnership was dissolved on January 19, 1998, when Diebold purchased IBM's share of the partnership for $16.1 million.
International growth (1998-2001)
In the 1990s the company significantly diversified its products, and by 1998 was offering "automated teller machines, electronic and physical security equipment, automated medication dispensing systems, software, supplies and integrated systems solutions." Under Diebold chairman and CEO Robert Mahoney, Diebold debuted an ATM in 1999 that identified customers using iris recognition, which was the first of its kind. Also that year, Diebold introduced the first talking ATM in the United States. In October 1999, Diebold acquired all the stock of Procomp Amazonia Industria Electronica, S.A, a manufacturer of retail and banking automation equipment such as ATMs based in Sao Paulo, Brazil.In 2001, Diebold acquired Mosler Safe Company in bankruptcy court and took over their operations, including securing the Charters of Freedom for the US National Archives in Washington, D.C. In February 2002, Diebold announced it would acquire the financial self-service assets of the European companies Getronics NV and Groupe Bull for approximately US$160 million. The agreement put Diebold near "$2 billion in revenue on an annualized basis." By the end of 2002, Diebold had 13,000 associates and serviced 88 countries. The company also continued to secure historical items such as the Hope Diamond at the Smithsonian Institution. Seeking to expand in India, at the end of 2002, Diebold announced a new production unit in Goa manufacturing ATMs in collaboration with Tata Infotech, and soon after announced a new corporate office in Mumbai. Revenue in 2003 was $2.1 billion for Diebold overall, with the stock up 36% for the year.
Diebold Election Systems and UTC (2002-2009)
In 2002, Diebold entered the United States elections industry through the acquisition of Global Election Systems, a producer of touch-screen voting technology based in McKinney, Texas. Branded Diebold Election Systems, the acquisition was their smallest business segment, and in late 2002, 3.7 million voters in Georgia used DES touch-screen stations. DES was soon the subject of controversy amid allegations surrounding the security and reliability of some of its products, as well as the political fundraising activities of Diebold's then-CEO Walden O'Dell in 2003. Critics argued O'Dell had a political conflict of interest which could compromise the security of Diebold's ballots, which O'Dell denied. Shortly afterwards, Diebold forbade its top executives from making political donations. Citing personal reasons, O'Dell resigned in December 2005 after several consecutive quarters of poor performance, with his role taken by Tom Swidarski. In August 2007, DES rebranded itself as Premier Election Solutions, and two years later the division was sold to a competitor, Election Systems & Software.Wired Magazine reported in 2007 that an editor using a Diebold IP address had removed negative information from the Diebold Wikipedia page, with the information later moved to a more appropriate location. Diebold was increasingly focusing on technology related to mobile banking as of 2008 incorporating mobile banking into many of its products. That year Diebold was selected to be the sole ATM provider at certain Beijing Olympics venues. In March 2008, United Technologies Corporation, a large engineering and defense conglomerate, announced it had made a $2.63 billion bid to buy Diebold, which was later rejected as too low. In October 2008, UTC announced it was breaking off acquisition talks after Diebold rejected the offer. The company had 17,000 workers worldwide by April 2009. In 2009 Bank Technology News ranked Diebold as No. 1 on its FINTECH 100 list of ATM providers.