Original text here from Patrice Bernard (LinkedIn)
Following a slowly spreading trend in Europe, in response to societal shifts regarding cash usage and banking services, three major French banks – BNP Paribas, Crédit Mutuel, and Société Générale – have started deploying their first joint ATMs earlier this year.
Almost a year after initially announcing the formation of this consortium, the initial rollout won't offer significant benefits to users yet. Only about sixty machines are involved at this stage, and they only offer cash withdrawals, just like the rest of the national network (though, it's true, there might be fees for transactions made outside the card issuer's establishment).
Users will have to wait until the end of the year to access more advanced options: depositing checks and cash, coin collection, and "self-service banking" – meaning the ability to check account balances and recent transactions, as well as execute transfers. Meanwhile, the installation of these ATMs will continue, aiming to reach around 7,000 locations by 2026, effectively tripling the network density for the customers of these banks.
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This move towards shared ATMs is a natural step in a context of rationalization, driven by both the steady decline in cash usage in commercial transactions and the increasing costs of maintaining and managing these machines. The drive for competitive differentiation through a widespread network of ATMs is now giving way to profitability demands.
Implicitly, and something the banks in the Cash Services initiative are careful not to emphasize, is the impact on physical bank branches. Indeed, the expansion of terminals capable of handling basic operations, heavily promoted, will likely lead to a reduction in branch numbers while giving customers the impression they still have local access to their bank.
In this regard, the long-term promise of a solution for communities wanting to offer basic services to their populations (reminiscent of a model Brinks has been marketing for years) becomes a clever (?) way to pass the cost of physical presence (albeit without human interaction) onto the users. Despite ongoing denials, the landscape of physical banking is clearly evolving, and it probably won't be long before France sees the kind of optimization strategies that have swept through the United Kingdom.
