London: Forty years ago an ATM was known as a ’mini-bank’, some even dubbed it a 'robot cashier' and the British nicknamed it “the hole in the wall”.
Today ATMs are something we just cannot do without. They have changed our approach to banking and made life for all of us a lot easier.
From fewer than 800 ATMs at the end of the 1960s, there are an estimated 1.6 million cash points all over the world today.
A British bank established the first ATM on June 27, 1967 in north London. Unlike today, there were no plastic cards back then and people first had to buy vouchers from a teller when the bank was open.
“In Britain alone, there's a phenomenal 5000 pound withdrawal out of UK ATM’s every second. Around 87 transactions are registered per second. Two thirds of the cash people carry around with them is actually from an ATM,” says Jemma Smith of APACS.
The man behind the ATM John Shepherd-Barron worked for money printer De La Rue.
He came up with the idea of ATM while in the bath, after a frustrating day when he couldn't cash a cheque. He decided on a six-digit pass code and then got his wife to approve the idea. Perhaps as a sign of the times, the first cash machine was vandalized.
“My wife said she couldn't remember more than four, so I changed it down to four. And the word pin came from my wife's nickname, and so it matched up with personal identification number,” says Shepherd-Barron.
However, Shepherd-Barron is convinced his contribution to the modern world would be short-lived. According to him, we will soon be using another indispensable tool - the mobile phone - to make electronic transactions.
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