Is the sound of an ATM dispensing cash becoming rare?
Except for the mobile phone, the ATM is one of the few technologies that has touched nearly every adult in the modern world. And yet today, it’s fading from view.
In the UK, the number of cash machines is quietly shrinking, and with every one that disappears, it takes with it a vital lifeline for millions who rely on cash for their basic needs.
According to Parliament’s Commons Library, ATMs in the UK peaked at some 70,588 in 2015, but since then their numbers have been dropping every year. Between 2018 and 2023, the UK lost around 16,500 ATMs – representing a decline of around 25% – leaving around 46,000 cash machines in service today.
ATMs are more than a convenience; for many they are a significant part of the fabric of everyday life. They keep communities connected to cash, offering resilience when digital systems fail, and dignity to those who rely on notes and coins to budget and transact. In times of crisis, the humble ATM has often been the last reliable gateway to money.
As the future of financial access becomes increasingly digital, the ATM remains a crucial counterbalance: a guarantee that choice, privacy, and inclusion do not vanish with the swipe of a card or the tap of a phone.
ATMs as Social Infrastructure
The ATM has been a quiet but profound force in shaping how we experience money. When they first appeared in the late 1960s, they represented technological innovation on our high streets, around the time we were heading off to the moon.
In those early days, they were relatively few and far between, but they transformed the relationship between people and their banks. Suddenly, access to money was no longer restricted to branch opening hours, it was immediate, personal, and available day and night.
Over time, ATMs became an integrated part of the social fabric: public touchpoints of the nation’s financial infrastructure. They were like bus stops, post boxes and pubs, established and embedded into the framework of a community. Very quickly, you could find an ATM in nearly every town, supermarket, or petrol station, reinforcing the simple but powerful idea: cash belongs to everyone, and it should be accessible everywhere.
In the early days of the ATM, a great many people were paid in cash. Brown envelopes were handed out on a Friday and were added to the household budget, where it would be shared amongst several savings jars (for utilities and the like), used to buy food and groceries and the surplus used for entertainment and savings, which would also find its way into a jar.
Our financial relationships with work changed as employers moved, albeit slowly, to paying wages by cheque and then directly into the bank. However, the cash economy didn’t go away, people would take their cheque to the bank and withdraw the cash or would even use their own cheque to draw all the cash and then revert to the established system of jam jars and shoe boxes. Many people simply didn’t trust the banks.
Cash has always been used for budgeting and for millions, especially those on low incomes and those budgeting from week to week, it still is. Cash used to be provided by employers, then over the counter by the banks, and then via ATMs. So, ATMs became the source of cash that allowed people to budget in the way that suited them best.
As bank branches are closing, which is essentially due to being replaced by apps (and ATMs), the ATM stands as probably the last universal cash provider, increasingly playing an essential role in delivering financial inclusivity to a significant yet under-represented group in society.
Who relies on ATMs today?
Even though ATM use has declined overall, they are still used by millions who rely on them for more than just the occasional cash withdrawal. The people that use ATMs and financial services fall into two broad groups: the banked, in the majority, and the unbanked or the financially vulnerable who could be either banked or unbanked.
For the banked, ATMs remain a quiet reassurance, and even if we don’t make use of them every week, we know where they are and we know they are there when we need them – for the local fete that only takes coins, for a taxi when card readers go down, or maybe for everyday budgeting when it’s easier to portion out cash than to track app notifications. ATMs are also trusted in moments of disruption: when digital payment systems falter, cash in hand can still (usually) buy food, fuel, or medicine. For many of us, just knowing the option is available is part of personal and national financial security.
Whilst the banked use ATMs for reassurance and convenience, others rely on them as a lifeline: a bridge to the cash economy.
For the unbanked and underbanked, ATMs are a lifeline rather than a convenience. They have become established and remain a fundamental bridge into the cash economy, enabling people to withdraw wages from prepaid cards, access remittances, or simply manage the household budget in a way that feels tangible and controlled – jam jars and shoe boxes. This group includes low-income families, gig workers paid irregularly, migrants navigating unfamiliar systems, and the elderly who may never fully embrace digital banking (although this demographic must be on the decline). For these people, the disappearance of a local ATM is so much more than an annoying inconvenience, it can mean exclusion from the economy itself.
The ATM fulfils a role that is easy to underestimate, especially if you don’t rely on cash!
The ATM preserves the freedom to access and manage money on one’s own terms, but as a provider of cash, it also acts as a small but vital safeguard against the risk of a two-tier society – access to goods and services should not be a function of some tier one digital convenience whilst others are quietly shut out.
We’ve seen card networks fail, sometimes on a Friday, sometimes due to system overload and sometimes due to poor system migrations. In moments like these, cash remains the ultimate fallback, allowing people to transact even when digital systems collapse.
The Danger of Decline
The ATM has quietly underpinned access to money for a long time, but its presence on the high street is shrinking. Branch closures, cost-cutting measures reducing the provision of remote ATMs operated by banks, and the rapid adoption of digital payments are steadily eroding the physical and social infrastructure that connects people to cash. The machines that once seemed to be everywhere, often side by side, are now patchy, uneven, and in some communities, disappearing entirely.
This decline has consequences that extend beyond inconvenience, maybe not for a lot of the digital generation, but certainly for those who rely on cash for budgeting, wages, or everyday purchases. The disappearance of ATMs threatens inclusion, autonomy, and financial dignity. When a local ATM vanishes, it’s not just about the space an ATM no longer occupies, it is about the loss of a vital piece of social infrastructure that previously allowed people to participate fully in the local economy.
The focused decline of the ATM is magnifying inequality. Those who are fully savvy with digital glide through their app-based banking, enjoying the speed, convenience, and seamless integration with the society that we have created, meanwhile, the people who consider cash to be essential are quietly marginalised. What begins as simple service rationalisation, can quickly turn an inclusive service – though it was never based on inclusivity – into a two-tier service driven primarily by footfall and usage. Restricting access to cash restricts access to goods, services, and even basic survival, as access to goods, services and basic survival become contingent on technological literacy and financial status.
Finally, we should be considering resilience. We have already seen how digital networks can fail – unplanned outages, botched system migrations, and cyber-attacks – and we have seen how quickly such failures can bring systems, services and shopping to a grinding halt!
If cash remains the ultimate fallback, ATMs become the last line of defence.
A shrinking ATM network reduces the ability of the financially vulnerable to function, and reduction strategies tend to target areas of low usage that tend also to be areas occupied by the financially vulnerable.
Whilst cash may no longer be king, it may become king once again if digital services fail or if they are attacked, leaving the banked and the digitally savvy to make their way in the world.
If digital systems fail, we all end up using cash, and whilst ATMs have a digital dependency, we should be hoping for the best but planning for the worst. Society is a lot more vulnerable than we realise.
In short, the decline of ATMs is not merely a banking issue. It is a societal issue. As financial systems are digitised, reducing the movement of cash, we risk losing a safety net that has quietly safeguarded autonomy, inclusion, and resilience for generations.
Why Preserving ATMs matters
Cash is more than paper (or plastic) and metal. Alongside the metaphysical arguments about the nature of money, cash represents privacy, resilience, and universality. It belongs to everyone, regardless of who they bank with, how much they earn, or whether they even have a bank account. Cash is fundamental, and without it, we would be swapping sheep for bananas – but digital cash still works like cash. If we didn’t have digital cash, society could operate on real cash, without the convenience of digital but it would work.
But if we are to preserve the cash model, for inclusivity, privacy, universality and contingency, the provision of cash without bank branches and ATMs becomes a right without any means of realising that right.
Preserving ATMs is not about us Luddites resisting progress, it’s about balance. Digital payments may dominate, and they may be convenient, but we should probably retain cash payments and access to cash as a counterbalance – a safety net for when systems fail, a budgeting tool for those who need or prefer physical control, and a guarantee of inclusion for anyone at the margins of finance.
Cash might be expensive, but we are often told that we are only four meals away from anarchy – the alternative isn’t without costs.
ATMs are not just machines. They are part of the social infrastructure of a functioning society. They are holding the door open to the cash economy, ensuring that resilience, choice, and financial dignity are not lost in the race to digitise.
Possible Futures
Where do we go from here? ATMs began as cash dispensing machines and over time, they were developed to provide value added banking information and data services, but now all the “traditional” ancillary services can be provided via mobile phone apps. The ATM had a go at ancillary services, but its superpower is dispensing cash.
The decline of the ATM is not inevitable, but neither can its survival be guaranteed. What happens next depends on the choices we make as a society – on the one hand, do we want to restrict choice and limit financial inclusion, on the other hand, do we really want to be putting all our eggs in one basket?
One future sees a slow but steady reduction in the availability of ATMs and cash as we expand strategies prioritising profit over people. ATMs become scarce, and access to cash becomes patchy and unequal. In this world, cash is reduced to a symbolic relic, technically legal but in any practical sense, unavailable. The result is a two-tier economy: frictionless for the digital majority, exclusionary for those who cannot or will not cross the digital threshold.
An alternative future is one of preservation and adaptation. In this world, we recognise that ATMs are an essential part of a modern society, and we support them as part of a modern financial infrastructure. They could be maintained as a public good, subsidised like libraries or bus routes, because their value is measured not in transaction volumes but in the resilience and equity they safeguard.
And maybe there is a third way, where ATMs evolve – they’ve done it before. However, I’m not going to hold my breath: deposit taking is a logistical nightmare and reverse vending doesn’t feel cost effective. But maybe some other magic will reveal itself if the ATM adopts a significant position in the community.
Whatever path we take, the cash on the table here is not the machine, but the principle that money – in all its forms – should remain accessible to all.
Conclusion
In the end, the story of the ATM is the story of access to cash. For decades these machines have quietly guaranteed that money remained tangible, universal, and resilient. It made no difference who you were, where you lived, or how much you earned.
As they disappear from our streets, we must be clear about what is at risk. This is not about nostalgia for plastic cards and keypads that beep. It is about whether financial access remains a right for all or becomes a privilege for the few. And it’s about whether we allow the logic of efficiency and the strategy of cost cutting to erode the principles of equity and resilience.
Hanging onto ATMs is not a fight against progress, it is a fight for a balanced approach to the provision of infrastructure. In a digital world, given our experience of banking and payment systems, could we not be accused of being naïve and complacent if we didn’t have a fallback or safety net?
Because when the systems we rely on falter – and history has shown that they will – we should be comfortable that cash still works.
The question is simple: do we design a future where cash remains available to all, or do we drift into one where millions are left behind, or one where we’re left without proper contingency? If we care about inclusion, about dignity, and about resilience, then ATMs must not be allowed to vanish into history. If we care about the potential devastation that an attack on digital financial systems might bring, then we need to retain the ability to do cash!
ATMs must remain part of our shared infrastructure, not because they are relics of the past, but because they safeguard the freedoms of the future.
