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Until 27 June 1967 there was only one way for bank customers to withdraw cash from their accounts. It involved visiting a branch during its opening hours, queuing up at a counter and presenting the teller with a cheque for the amount of money one wished to take out.
On a good day, it could be a quick and easy transaction. But there were days when everyone seemed to arrive at the same time and one found oneself in a long queue of people, many of whom wanted the bank to perform far more complex procedures than simply handing over cash.
Barclays Bank in the UK – the first financial institution in the world to introduce a cash machine for dispensing money – could hardly have envisaged just how much impact the invention was going to have on the habits of bank customers around the world.
Early transactions involved putting a single use coded paper voucher into the electronic automatic teller machine (ATM), developed by De La Rue, and withdrawing the maximum amount of cash allowed at that time: 10 £1 notes.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a similar revolution was taking place.
It had started 28 years earlier in the less sophisticated form of a mechanical cash dispenser installed in a branch of the Bank of New York. But it was removed after six months due to customers’ lack of acceptance.
The first US card-operated ATM also made its appearance in New York, two years after Barclays unveiled theirs, at the Chemical Bank. This handled reusable plastic cards with an embedded magnetic strip containing customer information. And, together with the use of PIN numbers, this has been the basis of the system since the 1970s.
As for the next 40 years, the most likely developments are an extension of the services provided by ATMs, including printing photographs, ordering flowers, topping up mobile phones or cash cards, downloading mobile ring tones and even playing games like Soduko.Such multi-function digital retail vending and dispensing machines are not in the future – they’re with us now. Felix Group launched the Max Box in the U K earlier this year, and the concept is likely to appear in other forms elsewhere in the world to satisfy local market demands.
The only certainty is that cash dispensing, in one form or another, will remain at the heart of automatic open-all-hours financial management well into the future.
Convenience outweighs other considerationsInevitably, where there is cash there is crime and the ATM’s history is inextricably linked to obtaining, by force or by fraud, the contents of the cash repositories that stand, ready to serve, on most high streets.Some robberies are brutal – such as using a forklift truck to remove the entire machine from the wall. Others target customers, either by snatching their cash as soon as it has been withdrawn or surreptitiously obtaining their card details and pin numbers by “skimming” or other electronic means. But the banks and ATM manufacturers – as well as the cash-loving public – are undeterred by such events. They know that the convenience of drawing money at any time of the day or night outweighs most other considerations, and unsurprisingly cash withdrawals continue to increase. |
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