Abbey National customers throughout the UK will be able to top up their Orange mobile phones using the bank's cashpoints from today.

The service, which will be available from all the banks 3,000 ATMs, is available only to Abbey National customers who also use Orange's prepaid mobile phone. However the bank is in talks with other operators to extend the service.

The rollout follows a pilot over the summer when the service was available from a small number of terminals at Abbey National's head office.

All top-up requests will be handled by ON/2, Abbey National's existing ATM transaction processing platform from S2 Systems.

The customer enters his or her card and PIN number, and requests a phone top-up. ON/2 then checks the mobile number is correct before sending a request to the network operator to authorise the transaction.
These authorisation requests are sent to Orange via Euronet WorldWide's ATM Recharge solution, which provides the interface with the network operators' systems. ®