Night safe

This article covers setting up banks. For the crime film from 1973 see Polizeiruf 110: Nachttresor .

A night safe is a facility of banks and savings banks that allows customers to deposit cash outside of counter hours. For customers, this is not a safe , but a throw-in, as withdrawals are not possible for them.

background

Gastronomy and retail businesses usually close much later than banks. In order not to have to store the daily income in the shop, which would lead to an increased risk of break-ins, night safes were set up as a kind of "mailbox".

construction

Typical night safes have an appropriately burglar-proof steel door. Customers have to register for use and be given a special key. This allows you to throw in a money bomb which, in addition to the money, also contains a written note about the target account. A mechanism recognizes the insertion and the customer receives a "fresh" (empty) money bomb back. The full money bomb slips into a burglar-proof magazine, where it is later removed and emptied by the staff.

The security of a night safe is mainly achieved through the "one-way function"; Once a money bomb has been thrown in, it is only accessible to staff. The lockable flap is primarily intended to protect against vandalism .

requirements

The use of a night safe not only requires registration, but also special trust in the employees entrusted with the emptying, since the customer is not present when counting the money.

risk

On the one hand, night safes allow customers to dispose of their cash holdings at any time. On the other hand, it increases the risk of robberies before landfilling. The financial institutions countered this early on with video surveillance , and in some cases night safes are also designed as car counters .

Current developments

• Cashless payment transactions reduced the amount of cash handled, but without affecting the use of the night safes.
• Occasionally the “classic” key was replaced by personalized keys (such as an EC card ). This eliminates the risk of lost keys, and at the same time thrown money bombs can be automatically assigned to the customer.
• In the future, the classic night safes will be used across the board and a. replaced by ATMs, where you can pay in banknotes by personalizing them with an account card, see: Cash Recycling . The banknotes are automatically counted and posted to the corresponding bank account. Since the payer is present here, he can at least indirectly monitor the counting process and, if necessary, cancel it if the counting result is not correct in his opinion.