Barclays celebrates golden anniversary of the ATM

As someone who worked nearby and banked with Barclays at the time I used the ATM when it first appeared. What is not mentioned in this article, or any other article in the press, is that it did not use plastic cards. You were sent five ten pound cheques in the post and you then inserted the cheques in the machine to get ten pounds out. The cheques had paper tape punched holes through the middle and your sort code and account number in MICR along the bottom.

Disagree with Fidor 's view as till the last country on earth using Cash, we may not call it for final days for Cash.

Each culture, society and country has it's own transition to adopt new changes whether it's technology, finance or any other thing. You can imagine a scenario - Your Wallet can be hit with ransomware and to release it need to pay let us say 50% of value....new way of e-bugglers...do you feel it's safe to use digital wallet or Cash?

Note: Before answering imagine you are struck with this situation while paying for Taxi or Hotel away from Home !!

Perhaps Sophie is right. As a payments nerd I really hope so. I need to travel back from Copenhagen via Hamburg tomorrow. So I will conduct a Hamburger taxi driver cashless society opinion poll and report back on how close we are to end of ATM.

I was under the impression that Germany is the biggest user of cash in the Western world. It is the Germans who insist on the continuation of the printing of the 500 Euro note, the largest note in circulation in Europe. If you want to get rid of cash. get rid of large value notes

South Korea is widely acclaimed to be years ahead of the ROW in mobile payments. But it still has the highest ATM density in the world! (Source). Looks like Fidor hasn't heard of this.

On a side note, from personal experience, all coffee shops (and cafeterias) inside Barclays premises went cashless nearly 10 years ago. Not sure whyMr. Raheel Ahmed, head of customer experience at Barclays, thinks you need cash for the office coffee run - cash is not required inside his office at least for that purpose, for sure!

@MelvinHaskins: You must write about your experience with the world's first ATM - along with a picture of those 10 pound cheques, if possible:) Every time someone says banks are not innovative, I cite ATM - and credit card - as counter-examples.

Ketharaman, there are no photographs, although Barclays themselves may have a copy in their archives. You need to understand that ten pounds was a significant sum of money in the UK in 1967. In my first job I earned 14 pounds per week before tax, and that included shift allowance. Barclays sent a pack of five ten pound cheques to their customers in the post for you to use as you wished. I am certain that the ATM's were stand alone - i.e. no links to a central computer. They installed a number of these ATM's around the country - I used one in Cardiff in South Wales in 1971. I have no idea how long they were in use before being replaced by the next generation.

@MelvinHaskins:

TY for your reply. I can easily believe that the ATMs of that era were standalone. Decades later, in 2000 in Germany, my bank's ATM was (partially) standalone. If I had EUR 1000 in my account and withdrew EUR 100 from the ATM, the ATM would continue to reflect a balance of EUR 1000 until midnight. I say "partially" because the ATM would let me withdraw only up to EUR 900 with immediate effect. To get my updated balance of EUR 900, I'd have to insert my debit-cum-ATM card into a machine located inside the ATM center, which would print all transactions that happened after my last printout of the statement.

Melvyn - Was it true the original (pre-card) paper vouchers were embedded with some radioactive compound as a counterfeit measure?

Lu, again no idea on the radioactive compound. I was 19 and naiive. The paper vouchers looked exactly like today's business cheques (checks), i.e. large in size, but had a series of diffent sized circular punched holes through the centre horzontally - exactly the same as paper tape, if you remember what that is. They also had your bank details in MICR along the bottom, exactly the same as cheques today. I believe that they were retrieved from the machine in the morning and then put into clearing the same way as regular cheques.