All we are saying is give cash a chance

An email arrives from Bank Machine's PR peeps..."You may well have seen that the UK Payments Council announced the results of their latest quarterly statistical report," says the PR lady. "Although trying desperately to make it a contactless story, the real story which they carefully buried were the stats showing that last year showed a record high in ATM withdrawals, beating the mark set in 2008."

It's true that the Payments Council press release went big on the fact that Britons sent two-thirds more money through Faster Payments in the last three months of 2011 compared to the previous year, with the ATM stats thrown in almost as an afterthought. So in the interest of fairness...The busiest single second in the LINK network’s 25 year history was recorded at 13:03:57 on Friday 28 October, with 482 transactions made. Overall, we used cash machines 2.87 billion times during the year, taking out £191 billion, and the overwhelming majority of these transactions were free. Fewer than one in 30 ATM withdrawals were at a pay-to-use machine in the last three months of 2011, the lowest percentage for seven years.   

And comment from Ron Delnevo, MD at Bank Machine: "The level of ATM usage vividly demonstrates once again that the British public continue to place their trust in cash. Neither flashy hyping of unproven gimmicks like "contactless" cards, nor attempts to limit access to ATMs, have prevented UK citizens from continuing to exercise their right to choose cash as their number one payment method."

According to the Payments Council, the underlying reasons for the record year are "the low levels of withdrawals a year earlier during the period of heavy snowfall, the increase in the number of free-to-use machines, coupled with an increase in the number of machines dispensing £5 notes, and a possible slight increase in demand for cash by people who prefer to use cash as a budgeting tool to control their spending."

There you go, everyone's happy.