Innovation is all the rage right now — especially in finance, where disrupters range from blockchain to crowdfunding. But the most groundbreaking innovation in the sector may actually lie behind us. Fifty years ago next week, one of the greatest financial inventions in recent history was unveiled, and has been quietly transforming our relationship to money ever since. I speak, of course, of the humble automated teller machine.
In 2009 Paul Volcker, berating a banking industry that had taken finance to the brink of disaster, quipped that “the ATM has been the only useful innovation in banking for the past 20 years”.
Aside from this praise from the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, the ATM has been omnipresent but under-appreciated. Like a late-developing child, it sits mute and misunderstood in our high streets, appearing to do little more than dispense banknotes. Yet the ATM is far from dumb; with more than 11,000 working parts and linked to “intelligent” software systems, it is one of the most sophisticated inventions to come out of the UK.