Cash has as little as five years left in the UK, warns the CEO of Link, the country’s largest ATM machines network.
John Howells said in a report in the Sunday Telegraph that the cost of providing ATMs, security and bulk cash centres is as much as £5bn each year. Howells said that many of these costs were fixed and would remain even if the consumers continue to move towards digital payments.
Cash use, he said, is down by 40 per cent since the beginning the pandemic and it is still falling. A recent report from UK Finance, the banking trade body, estimated that only one in every 20 transactions will be made using cash by 2031.
Around five million people – mostly in rural locations, or the less wealthy – are at risk of being left behind unless more is done to help them switch to digital. “We have ten years to fix digital payments before cash becomes unworkable,” he said.
Link operates 54,000 ATMs with the number of free-to-use machines falling annually, now down to 40,830.
