Forecasting the Growth of ATM and POS in the Portuguese Banking System

There are several factors that have been influencing and creating deep changes in the Portuguese banking sector. Among these, we can highlight technological innovation, the increasing consumer’s technological knowledge, the segmentation of the sector and the liberalization of the distribution systems. This way, it seems logical to accept that the continuous sophistication of the intra and inter-organizational information systems can become not only a potential “crowbar” to improve a firm’s market position but also a potential determinant of profitability and, consequently, a strong source of competitive advantage. In this perspective, the automatic payment in Portugal has showed periods of very strong growth in the last couple of years. In fact, the current Portuguese banking net system has a capacity of more than 8400 Automated Teller Machines and 90600 Points-of-Sale, where buying and paying any service in a very comfortable way are allowed. Due to the great impact that those services have been getting on the Portuguese population since their appearance, the main point of this paper is connected with an application of the Epidemic Model in order to forecast the number evolution of ATM and POS in the Portuguese banking system for the next years.