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Cash isn’t dead, but it’s getting more expensive to keep around

As cash use declines, the cost of keeping it accessible is rising. With ATMs vanishing and hidden expenses mounting, is it still the cheaper option?

Michael Ebstein Michael is Director of MWE Consulting, and previously served as GM Marketing at ANZ Global Payments.
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Cash remains a budgeting tool, a backup payment method during system outages and a means of exchange in the black economy. But it is getting more expensive. Shutterstock.

ATMs were once a symbol of banking convenience, but their slow disappearance marks a bigger change. As cash usage declines, the cost of maintaining the infrastructure that supports it is rising, leaving businesses to pick up the bill.

In 2014, I wrote a piece pondering the role of the ATM at that time. Once seen as a revolutionary step in electronic banking when introduced to Australia in the late 1970s, the ATM’s relevance was already facing questions.

“Maybe it is premature to predict the ultimate demise of the ATM, but its primary role as a dispenser of cash is less and less important as less and less cash is used,” I wrote then. “It’s just a matter of time until this staple of late 20th-century banking morphs into something else or disappears.”

Eleven years later, we’re having a similar conversation. It’s worth revisiting what has changed.

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