Cummins Allison Brand Guidelines: Chicago 1887, JetScan & a Crane Purchase

A perforator maker on Chicago’s North Side.

Cummins Allison dates its business to 1887. The Made-in-Chicago Museum, which collects objects manufactured in the city, lists The B. F. Cummins Company as established in that year and holds a “Chicago” check perforator from the early 1900s made by the firm, which also traded as the Cummins Perforator Co., at a works in the Ravenswood area of Chicago’s North Side. A check perforator punches a pattern of holes through a paper cheque.

English Wikipedia gives the same founding year. It describes the modern company, Cummins-Allison Corp., as a maker of currency-handling and coin-handling systems, including currency and coin counting machines, and says its products are used mainly by banks and casinos to count and sort money. The company is based in Mount Prospect, Illinois, in the north-west suburbs of Chicago, and Wikipedia adds that it has offices elsewhere in North America and in the UK.

Crane Payment Innovations, which owns the business today, gives the same date. Its brand history lists Cummins Allison as “founded 1887, USA” and describes it as a provider of currency and image-processing equipment. The legal name carries a hyphen, Cummins-Allison Corp., while the products and service pages use the unhyphenated brand name Cummins Allison; this guide follows the brand spelling.

The company built a reputation for patents. In June 2012 Crain’s Chicago Business ranked Cummins Allison third in an index of the most innovative companies in the Chicago area, measured by the number and quality of their patents, English Wikipedia says, citing that article.

JetScan, JetSort and the back office.

The brand’s machines count and sort money for cash offices, counting rooms and vaults. Its main family is JetScan, a range of currency scanners, counters and sorters. A widely used image on English Wikipedia shows a United States Navy disbursing clerk counting twenty-dollar bills on a JetScan machine.

Crane Payment Innovations now sells the JetScan line under its own name. Its note-processing pages list the JetScan iFX money counters, the JetScan MPX and JetScan MPS currency sorters and the newer JetScan ULTRA, together with a JetScan model for law enforcement and a JetSuite sorter sold in Germany, and say that financial institutions, casinos, armoured-car carriers, tax offices, schools, vending companies, retailers, law-enforcement agencies and government bodies use them. On the coin side the company lists the JetSort coin counters and sorters, including the JetSort 1000, 4000 and 6000, along with regional models for Canada and the UK, and CoinMax, a self-service coin-counting kiosk that CPI offers to banks and retailers.

When Crane bought the company, the cash-management consultancy Secura Monde International described Cummins Allison in January 2020 as a US maker of high-speed cash and coin counting and sorting machines, ATMs, retail cash office systems and related software, backed by a nationwide service network. CPI says Cummins Allison devices are kept running under annual service contracts by a nationwide support network, and that casino operators, cash-in-transit firms and bank vaults have relied on Cummins Allison technicians for more than 50 years.

A separate Cummins Allison online store remains open for consumables and spare parts: printer paper and ribbons, magnetic-ink cheque paper, coin wrappers and bags, and currency straps and bands. It still carries the Cummins-Allison Corp. copyright line, while the company’s own former web address now forwards to a CPI page titled “Cummins Allison to CPI.”

How cash handling makers present themselves.

Cash-handling makers sell machines that most people meet without ever choosing them. Their products appear in bank lobbies and in the walls of branches, behind teller counters as cash recyclers, beside supermarket tills as coin counters, and in the printing halls where banknotes are made. The maker’s name is often a small plate on a large machine, so the brand does much of its work in brochures, trade stands and service contracts rather than on the street.

The machines themselves come in families. NCR’s first serious ATM generation, the 5070 of 1983, was developed at its Dundee plant in Scotland and came in lobby and through-the-wall versions, with modules that could be taken out for repair or refilling, according to English Wikipedia. That modular build lends itself to cutaway diagrams, which trace the path a note takes through a machine from cassette to dispenser.

Trade fairs and bank technology conferences are where new machines are shown. Diebold demonstrated a cash machine prototype at the American Bankers Association’s annual meeting in 1966, and in October 2015 showed two ATM concepts at the Money20/20 show in Las Vegas, English Wikipedia says. The ATM Industry Association gives its own awards, which makers list on their websites.

Ownership in this sector changes often. Diebold took over Germany’s Wincor Nixdorf in 2016, NCR split off its ATM business as NCR Atleos in 2023, and in February 2026 the cash carrier Brink’s agreed to acquire NCR Atleos, ATM Marketplace reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where its machines are made — and marks clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

From family firm to a Crane brand.

The company changed hands at the end of 2019. Crane Co., the Connecticut-based industrial group, completed its purchase of Cummins Allison Corp. on 31 December 2019, according to Secura Monde International’s report of 29 January 2020 and English Wikipedia. Crane’s chief executive told investors that Cummins Allison and Crane Payment Innovations built their products on similar core technologies for sorting, counting and validating cash and coins, and that the two businesses were expected to share technology and research, with savings looked for in materials, supply chain, manufacturing and research and development, Secura Monde reported. The business was placed in Crane’s Payment & Merchandising Technologies segment.

CPI lists Cummins Allison as having joined Crane in 2019, and its transition page says that “in 2020 CPI joined forces with Cummins Allison,” adding: “We are now One CPI.” In April 2023 Crane split in two, and the payment business, including CPI and with it Cummins Allison, became part of Crane NXT, which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange on 4 April 2023 and is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, according to Crane NXT’s press releases. Cummins Allison now survives as a product and service name within CPI rather than as a separate trading company.

For a design guide, Cummins Allison shows how an old engineering name can live on as a product brand inside a larger group, carried by machine names such as JetScan rather than by a corporate identity. Compare Crane Payment Innovations, the business that absorbed it, and SCAN COIN, another coin-counting maker now inside a larger group. For this guide we use a vault navy, a steel grey and a pale note mint with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cummins Allison’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.