Wells Fargo ATMs to offer phone access

New York — Wells Fargo plans to upgrade all 13,000 of its ATMs next week to allow customers to access their funds using their cellphones instead of traditional bank cards.

The announcement was made by Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan on Tuesday at an employee town hall in Orlando.

While banks like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have announced similar upgrades to their ATMs, those are still being rolled out. Wells Fargo would be the first to upgrade all of its ATMs with the feature across the United States.

To access their money, customers would get unique eight-digit codes from their Wells Fargo smartphone app, and enter the code into the ATM along with their PIN number. The machines will still accept debit cards as well.

A limitation of the one-time code, though, is that it won’t work on the secure doors that require a customer to swipe an ATM or debit card to gain entry for non-business hours. Wells Fargo said such doors are at a small percentage of branches.