Banks cull ATMs as more customers ditch cash
Major banks removed hundreds of ATMs in the latest year, as the industry responded to the scrapping of withdrawal fees and consumers further reduced their use of cash.
In a trend that is tipped to ramp up as digital payments take off, all of the big four have made cuts to their ATM networks in the latest 12 months for which figures are available, with one lender culling one in four machines.
The decline of ATMs, which were first rolled out by banks in the 1980s, has been predicted by experts for several years, but it is only fairly recently that numbers have begun to fall meaningfully from their peak of 32,879 machines in late 2016.
Each of the big four banks confirmed its ATM fleet is shrinking, and industry-wide figures from the Australian Payments Network show that in the year to September, the total number of ATMs around the country fell by almost 2000, or 6 per cent, to 30,219.
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