This is a first in France. BNP Paribas, Société Générale (SG), Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale and its subsidiary CIC now have around sixty joint ATMs (ATMs). These three large networks announced less than a year ago their intention to pool their 15,000 distributors. This will ultimately result in a division by almost two of their fleet. The reductions in distributors will be especially marked in urban areas.
The first distributors, called “Cash Services”, have just been installed across France. For the moment, they allow customers of BNP Paribas, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale (and CIC) and Société Générale to withdraw cash for free. All services will be available by the end of 2024: deposit of checks, cash, printing of RIB, making a transfer, access to balance and account history, specifies Cash Services, managed by the 2SF company, common to the three major banking networks. Consumers should find this out, because banks are charging more and more for displaced withdrawals, that is to say made outside of an ATM in their network.
The deployment of Cash Services machines will continue until 2026. At that date, the fleet will be made up of nearly 7,000 sites (there can be several machines on the same site), compared to 10,000 currently. However, “customers will benefit from increased accessibility to cash and banking services throughout France,” assure the three major banks. The distributor offering will be reinforced “up to 3 times”.
The objective of the three brands is first to adapt to the decline in the use of cash, which is accelerating. Pooling collection points will also and above all reduce the costs of managing distributors, which are expensive to maintain. Between 2018 and 2021, the number of ATMs fell by almost 10% (47,853 in total). And this trend continued in the following years, particularly in large cities, but also in some rural areas. To remedy this potential problem, the company 2SF proposes to “deploy a commercial offer to municipalities that would like to equip themselves with a Cash service point, even if no bank branch of these member brands is present locally” .
