Just before Christmas, I attended an Entrepreneur’s Network Dinner, hosted by Ernst & Young. I spoke to a number of people about our business and on every occasion their initial reaction was ‘Oh, those are the machines that you pay to use.’ It struck me that we still have a lot of work to do to show how our industry has progressed, since the Independent ATM Deployers (IAD’s) entered the market in the late 1990’s. At that time, there was rapid expansion of Pay-to-Use machines, as a result of de-regulation, allowing non financial institutions to install ATMs.
However, over the last 5 years the trend has shifted significantly towards Free-to-Use (FTU) machines. From installing our first FTU ATM in 2007, YourCash now has around 2,300 machines providing customers with convenient and free access to their cash, across the UK. In addition, over 80% of cash withdrawals on YourCash ATMs are now done on a FTU basis.
Pay-to-Use machines still have an important role to play, in locations, for example, where there would be insufficient transactions to make a FTU machine viable. But it certainly isn’t a ‘One size fits all approach’ and we will look at each individual location and work with the site owner to decide on the best way forward.
Ewan Oglivie
Managing Director, UK and Europe
