“Between January 2024 and November 2024, we’ll be phasing out our cash and cheque services across all Macquarie banking and wealth management products, including pension and super accounts.
We’re also switching off our automated telephone banking service used to make payments over the phone. This means from November 2024 we’ll no longer offer cash or cheque services. Instead, you’ll be able to make payments digitally – a safer, quicker, and more convenient way to bank.”
We were in London and the Cotswolds earlier in September. I was surprised by the number of small businesses, mostly restaurants, that would not accept cash. They often displayed a sign saying, “No Cash. Cards only.”
As offered from time to time, when a business wants to reduce costs, the first casualties are usually customer service and quality control, because you can’t prove to a bean counter how much business you lose due to lousy customer service, and the blowback from poor quality control doesn’t occur until a few quarters later.
It is surprisingly expensive to accept cash. Businesses are becoming increasingly reluctant to accept it for that reason. This is problem for the unbanked/underbanked population.
vs the bank’s skim on a credit card. Of course, back in the 70s and 80s, I had to call a human at a call center to get an authorization code for any CC transaction over the floor limit, usually $50. At Christmas, the call centers were jammed, and it would take a considerable amount of time to get through. That issue started going away with the introduction of computerized POS systems that call in for an authorization by themselves. The CC companies no longer need to spend a bundle building and staffing call centers to issue the authorization codes. Did the CC companies reduce their skim rate, proportional to their cost savings by eliminating the call centers, or did they pocket the loot?
As noted before, you can’t prove to a beancounter the amount of business lost by decreasing customer service.
Did you even read your own link? Never mind, that was rhetorical. I already know the answer.
From your link:
Once the changes are rolled out, anyone who banks with Macquarie and wants to withdraw cash will be relegated to the bank’s ATMs, which allow customers to withdraw a maximum of $2,000 AUD per day.
So, cash NOT eliminated, simply available in the ATM instead of from a human - something many US banks have been doing for years (my local bank has a fancy cash machine - an ATM on steroids - but no tellers).
Note this was from nearly 10 years ago:
Hawkwin
It should be “illegal” for people to post links that they have not read and fully understood.
Banks skim businesses for cash deposits, too. They’ve charged a fee to businesses for handling cash since the beginning of time (which for me was when I started working in accounting and finance back in the early 1980s). The fee is typically some rate like $3 per $100 deposited for the first $1000 per day, and goes down as you deposit more. It often can be partially or fully offset by a credit based on your average daily balance.
Some gas stations around casa del Steve do that now. Charging extra for CC transactions at gas stations became common in the 80s, when squeezing customers became “good business”. Charging people an annual “membership” fee just to carry a credit card became popular in the 80s too. The bank I used in the 90s started charging to use a human teller, for anything. The bank froze my savings account because, they decided, I didn’t keep the account active enough, even though my linked checking account was plenty active. To remove the freeze on my savings account, I had to use a human teller, which they charged me for.