I went to a dinner last week, which was attended by a number of senior people from a variety of different businesses. As I introduced myself, and said that I worked for YourCash, an Independent ATM Deployer (IAD), the standard response was ‘Oh, one of those machines that charge you £1.75’
I proudly puffed out my chest and said that over 80% of all YourCash withdrawals are now Free-to-Use and only 1 in 10 of our new installations is done on a Pay-to-Use (PTU) basis. The numbers are even more impressive if you include our estates in The Netherlands which are exclusively FTU. However, it made me think about why I felt the need to be so defensive regarding our PTU proposition.
Everyone likes to be able to have access to cash, and in most cases we can provide a FTU machine. We then recover our costs through interchange, where the banks pay us a small fee, every time one of their customers uses one of our ATMs. This works fine, providing the machine does sufficient transaction volumes, but where the numbers are lower, it simply doesn’t make economic sense. Irrespective of the number of people that use the machine, we still need to pay for the hardware, installation, on-going maintenance, processing and communications…….and hopefully make a bit of profit. So a site doing, for example, 100 transactions per month just wouldn’t work on a FTU basis, but it might be possible with a £1.75 fee.
So would the 100 people a month that use this ATM prefer to pay £1.75 a go, or have the machine removed and then possibly need to travel a number of miles to find another one? Isn’t that fee a reasonable amount to pay for the convenience?
I think the trend towards FTU will continue, but maybe we shouldn’t write off the PTU machine just yet!
Ewan Ogilvie
Managing Director of UK & Europe
YourCash Ltd
Link: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140613130559-54738571-the-perception-of-pay-to-use-atms to the article – there’s some interesting comments trending!!!
