When Was the First Time You Used an ATM Card?

Clowns. Antarctica. Banks. When was the first time you used an ATM card?

Vatican ATM

A clown was standing outside my bank, near an ATM machine that I had studiously ignored since its dramatic unveiling by the bank some weeks earlier.

It was in the mid 1970s.

The clown, however, with the exaggerated movements of clowns everywhere, was funny and approachable.

He was showing a customer standing near the new ATM how they could, as if by magic, get money out of it from their account.

Even with learning how to use the machine, getting money in a drawer by using what looked like a credit card was way faster than going into the bank to wait for a teller.

And, that was the point. It was faster for customers and cheaper for banks to use machines to dispense money automatically.

History

Pieces of a cash-dispensing system had been in development since 1959, in Japan, the U.S., Sweden and the U.K.

Barclay’s Bank in the UK claims the first cash machine in 1967.

In 1968 the networked, bar-striped card activated, cash-dispensing and account debiting system we know as the Automatic Teller Machine, or ATM, debuted in Dallas, Texas.

My bank learned quickly that people like to talk to people when they are getting their money. They had to do something to get people like me to start using their marvelous new machines.

Bring in the clowns.

Where Are They Today?

Off-premise ATMs soon sprang up wherever people needed cash, after some legal wrangling about what constitutes a bank and where they can be.

There is one in Antartica.

There is one at the Vatican.

If you use one overseas, it will convert the dollars in your account to the local currency.

There are now an estimated 2.2 million ATMs in use.

Are There Any Downsides?

It is considered poor etiquette to look over someone’s shoulder when they are keying in their PIN (Personal Identification Number) code.

Banks have gone through several designs of the space around their ATMs to ensure safety.

Incidents of people stealing cash from someone who had just withdrawn a sum from the ATM, especially late at night, prompted banks to add security cameras to ATM areas.

Banks typically add fees for transactions at ATMs that are not in their networks.

Customers complained, however, when they also added fees for their own ATM transactions and these were largely dropped. After all, they were supposed to save the banks money already, not be an independent new profit center for the non-bank hours convenience.

How Do They Make It Secure?

The security comes from having to know both a PIN code and having the right plastic card to access your account.

I learned the value of this two-part system on a cold Winter day in 1991. My father had died suddenly just a week earlier. I was distracted.

“You left your card in the ATM machine.” A stranger held out my card.

“Thank you.”

There were no more clowns, but the ATM had become part of my life.

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Do you remember the first time you used an ATM?

Who introduced you to ATMs?

Do your grandchildren know what life was like before ATMs?

To you and the convenience creative thinkers bring to the world.

Carol Covin, Granny-Guru