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.

All in a good cause

Quick plug for Bank Machine, which is inviting Britain’s charities to sign up for a scheme enabling charitable donations at ATMs.

Charities can register an interest before the end of November. The donations option on the LINK ATM network is planned to go live during April 2012. Bank Machine’s managing director, Ron Delnevo, says: "We fully support this superb initiative. We believe many millions of pounds can be raised for good causes and we want to give as many charities as possible the opportunity to apply to participate at Bank Machine ATMs. We will select from those charities that apply directly to us.”

"Times are hard, and all of us in the UK need to pull together to ensure that the least fortunate are not forgotten. Almost everyone in the UK uses ATMs, so what could be easier and more fulfilling than, when we are getting some cash out for ourselves, at the same time sending a donation to support charities which work with the most needy in our country and overseas,” he adds.

Further info here.

Happy birthday to the ATM

Forty four years ago this week, the world's first ATM was installed at a branch of Barclays in Enfield, north London. Reg Varney, from the bafflingly popular ITV sitcom On the Buses (74 episodes and three spin off films! I mean, what were the British public thinking?), was the first to withdraw cash. 

On the subject of ATMs, Ron Delnevo, managing director at Bank Machine, will be one of the speakers at our forthcoming payments conference. Ron will be discussing one of the hot topics of the day - 'cash vs contactless'. The conference will take place in London during November and we're holding it in conjunction with our sister title, Retail Systems. Paul Rodgers of Vendorcom will chair and there will also be speakers from the likes of Barclaycard, Best Buy UK and S1 Corporation.

We're currently putting the finishing touches to the website, but in the meantime if you would like further information on the agenda, speaker opportunities, time, place etc, feel free to drop me a line at: scott.thompson@fstech.co.uk