The software detects nervousness or emotional distress, possible indications that a credit applicant is dissembling. That information, Mr. Orlovsky said, would be used in combination with other data, including credit history.

Sberbank is hardly alone in looking over the horizon at new types of banking automation.

Deutsche Bank and Citigroup, for example, are testing futuristic technologies in a handful of bank branches in Berlin, New York and Tokyo. Those banks say their efforts focus on new types of interactive displays and touch-screen terminals, such as a table top made by Microsoft that senses documents and other items placed on it.

And credit approvals by A.T.M. are already a fact of financial life in Turkey, for one, where the bank machines are helping fuel a consumer credit boom that some analysts fear could spiral into a debt crisis.

But Sberbank may be unique so far in trying to turn A.T.M.’s into truth machines.

“We don’t know of any major U.S. financial institutions doing things along those lines, such as trying to gauge whether somebody is lying,” Daniel Wiegand, a senior analyst at Corporate Insight, a company that consults with banks on consumer technology, said in a telephone interview.

A prototype of the machine is on display at Sberbank’s Branch of the Future laboratory in a nondescript office building above a Moscow subway station.

The lab bristles with biometric surveillance technology. When a person walks in, a facial-recognition camera takes note, and an artificial voice cheerily greets known customers. Or, more often, it utters a glum, “Hello, you are not registered,” because only a few of the lab’s staff members have had their faces scanned so far.