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ALTHOUGH computerised ATM machines didn’t emerge as a mainstream feature of the urban landscape until the 1970s and 1980s, the first Automated Teller Machine was opened as early as 1967. Barclays Bank introduced the ur-ATM machine (branded as Barclaycash) which was located at its Enfield Town, London, branch, with popular 1960s TV comedy actor Reg Varney (above, performing the “celebrity opening”) selected in the role as “Customer No 1”. Designed by John Shepherd-Barron, the DACS machine lacked one essential ingredient of the modern ATM – no magnetic plastic card! Instead, customers inserted a cheque-like token impregnated with a radioactive compound which when matched with the customer’s ID dispensed money (initially limited to a maximum of £10).

The need for ATMs grew out of the service limitations of the highly regulated banking system in a changing modern world. Banks in the UK and elsewhere were hamstrung by quite restricted business hours, often open only around ten to three weekdays. Customers who worked during these hours found their access to personal banking severely curtailed, especially when it came to the withdrawal of cash. In the Sixties project teams in banks in the UK, Sweden and Japan were all working at developing a form of automated cash dispenser. The successful introduction of the ATM in public locations solved the problem, offering instant, 24-hour access to cash.

After the Enfield ATM and it’s successors opened their windows there was some initial reluctance by customers to embrace the radical new way of banking⌖…a wait-and-see attitude prevailed, but not for long. Today ATMs swamp the commercial retail world, at a rough estimate there is over three million units operate globally (there’s even one in Antarctica!)

The pioneer of the PIN 📌 As with the debate over the invention of the first flying machine, Shepherd-Barron’s claim to originality has its challengers. Around the same time development engineer James Goodfellow came up with his own version, a Chubb machine❂ which worked on a PIN number associated with a code token in the form of a plastic card with punched holes. Goodfellow’s innovation was installed in branches of the Westminster Bank one month after the Barclays ATM.

Innovative Scanda 🏧 But can we categorically say with 100% surety that Goodfellow was the sole originator of the PIN? Sweden has a claim here too for pioneering recognition. The Metior Company’s Bankomat came into operation at Uppsala Sparbank just one week after the Barclays’ machine. The Swedish technology, on display at a Stockholm fair in 1964, presented a plastic-coated card and linked PIN. It seems likely that Shepherd-Barron, Goodfellow and the Swedes all devised their ATMs at around the same time independently without any connexion to or cognisance of each other’s projects.

Neither Shepherd-Barron or Goodfellow are credited with devising the concept of the ATM itself. The consensus tends to attribute this to Armenian-American inventor Luther George Simjian. Simjian’s Bankograph, patented in 1960 but never fully commercially developed, came up with the idea of a “hole-in-the wall machine” that would allow customers to make financial transactions.

As with the debate over the invention of the world’s first manned flying machine, Shepherd-Barron’s claim to prototype creation has its challengers. Around the same time as the Shepherd-Barron innovation development engineer James Goodfellow came up with his own version, a Chubb machine❂ which worked on a PIN number associated with a code token in the form of a plastic card with punched holes. Goodfellow’s innovation was installed in branches of the Westminster Bank one month after the Barclays ATM.

Introduction of the ATM in America 🏧 The first American ATM was introduced in 1969✪ at the Chemical Bank’s branch in New York’s Rockville Centre (in the US they are sometimes referred to as “cashpoints”). The pioneering 24/7 US ATM (designed by Donald Wetzel) the Docuteller utilised reusable magnetic coded cards.

On the road to digital banking 🏧 These early dinosaurs of the alternative to face-to-face banking, the 1960s generation of ATMs, were of course all offline. The world’s first computerised ATM, introduced by Lloyds Bank, didn’t have its genesis (again in the UK) until December 1972…installed in Brentwood, Essex, the ATM cash machine was developed in partnership with IBM.

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⌖ prior to the introduction of the ATM and in its formative stage there was unsurprisingly a degree of resistance to them from banking employee unions

❂ the Chubb cash dispensing machine in its earliest iteration retained the user’s card (as proof of receipt), which later was posted back to the owner

✪ coincidentally the same year of the first operating ATM machine in Spain