The Bottom Line - Europe

1. Start your year as you mean to go on – plan together for success

This week saw the interim report from the Access to Cash team, a body set up to look at the future of cash, funded by LINK– the Scheme behind the ATM Network – and overseen by Natalie Ceeney, an ex-Financial Ombudsman. The report, and the BBC article accompanying it, highlighted revealing facts from ATM transactions declining by 8% in the course of the last year and the decline increasing by 5% since the beginning of 2018, to 37% of us still needing cash as local services and shops don’t yet take digital payments. Fortunately, as point of sale (POS) hardware technology replacement cycles are relatively short, contactless solutions will soon be ubiquitous, facilitating wider payment options for merchants and their customers.