Payment Choice Alliance - Latest News Feed

UK Doesn’t Have A Total Monopoly Of Bad Banks!

Classic bad bank behaviour, this time in New Zealand.

After 70 years of getting his cash over the counter at his branch, a customer is told the bank no longer offers the service.

Here’s a quote from the article.

“A spokesperson for SBS bank confirmed that the bank ceased offering branch cash services on Friday, August 28, after earlier communications with members.

These communications included guidance on alternative ways to bank, along with support to set up cards and digital banking.”

A customer wants to use cash and the bank offers advice on “alternative ways to bank”? In the same article, ANZ commented that cash use “should be preserved for New Zealanders who need it”.

Note “need” NOT “want”.

Awful New Zealand Banks copying British Big Five Bank phraseology!

Do Havas PR work for the NZ banks, as well as those in the UK?

Meantime, the local retailers association - Retail NZ - say “adequate access to cash services remain a core requirement for the country’s retailers.”

So “adequate” - a variation on the UK HM Treasury weasel-word “reasonable” - definitely not CONVENIENT.

Mind you, at least New Zealand still has more bank branches than the UK per head of population.

Between them, the NZ banks have around 700 branches. With an adult population of 4.3 million compared to the UK’s 58 million, the same branch coverage in the UK would require over 9000 branches.

The Big Five UK Banks have under 2000 branches between them.

A disgracefully inadequate in-person community banking provision in the UK.

The UK public are sick of being dictated to by the Big Five UK Banks.

Whether they realise it yet or not, 2027 is going to mark the beginning of the end of the banks power over the UK public.

That end cannot come soon enough...

Source: stuff.co.nz/nz-news/361046888/84-year-old-denied-cash-withdrawal-bank-he-has-been-70-years

Only One Place For The Truth About Cash In The UK!

A quote, regarding findings from European Central Bank market research.

“In 2026, 92% of of Euro-area companies that sell their goods and services in physical locations reported that they accept cash. The corresponding share in 2024 was 90%.

Companies covered by the survey have a higher regard for cash than digital payments in terms of privacy and reliability. A high share of companies also perceive cash to be better than digital payments in terms of overall costs, transaction speed, ease of handling and security.”

Three comments.

It would be great to compare with findings from similar Bank of England market research.
The number of businesses accepting cash is high - and increasing.
Businesses believe that cash outperforms digital on “ overall costs, transaction speed, ease of handling and security”. Frankly, stunning findings.

The harsh reality is that in the UK we are NEVER told the truth about cash.

Everything we are fed by most of the financial services industry and the “authorities” is thinly-disguised promotion of “cashless”.

It has been very difficult to get the truth out into the public domain, because significant elements of the media have fallen for the ”cashless” bull****.

However, the cracks are appearing and soon “cashless” will be swept away.

That really can’t come soon enough -but 2027 will be just fine….

Source: finextra.com/newsarticle/48255/companies-prefer-cash-over-digital-payments---ecb

Prime Minister MUST End The Tyranny Of The Apps!

“The Department for Education said the legislation did not cover phone use during travel to school and that app-only fare discounts were a matter for individual bus operators”.

The Tyranny of the Apps.

In almost NO other country in Europe would bus operators get away with something so obviously WRONG.

This effectively copies the HM Treasury script on “cashless”, where the 1 Horseguards team habitually spout guff along the lines of “accepting cash is a matter for individual businesses”.

In almost NO other country in Europe would businesses get away with something so obviously WRONG.

We are now at a crossroads.

The new leadership of Andy Burnham is likely to be marked by solutions which are strong on common sense and practicality.

It is neither sensible nor practical to compel ANYONE -including children - to have a smartphone and apps to participate on an equitable basis in British Society.

It is neither sensible nor practical to compel ANYONE - including children - to STOP using cash to participate on an equitable basis in British Society.

Over to you, Prime Minister.

Legislation is required to sort out both of these issues once and for all.

Please deliver that legislation during H1 2027.

Source: theguardian.com/money/2026/sep/26/schoolchildren-smartphones-higher-bus-fares-england

The UK MUST Copy Swedens Rejection Of “Cashless”!

This article in The Daily Telegraph states that Sweden was due to become “cashless” in 2030.

That is NOT correct.

The renowned US Wharton School actually forecast Sweden would be “cashless” by March 2023.

How badly wrong was THAT prediction!

It is absolutely brilliant that the Swedish Government and Central Bank - the Sveriges riksbank - have realised the folly of “cashless”.

Now the Swedish banks have to allow cash withdrawals and deposits in-branch - and more 24/7 ATMs will be required.

Shops and other businesses will also be required to accept cash for in-person payments. If Sweden - the former Poster Child of the “cashless” dictators - can take such steps, why not the UK?

NO GOOD REASON AT ALL

Bear in mind that one reason Sweden has cancelled “cashless” is the threat from Russia. On the day when the UK Prime Minister announced that Russia definitely interfered in the Brexit Referendum, it is clear that Putins Russia may well be an even greater threat to the UK than it is to Sweden.

Time to act to restore convenient 24/7 access to cash in the UK AND to oblige UK businesses to accept cash for in-person payments.

Over to you, Andy Burnham!

Source: telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/10/11/why-sweden-is-abandoning-its-cashless-society

Cash Access Collapsing In Scotland

Once again, great coverage of cash issues by The Herald Scotland.

It is harder than ever before for the Scottish public to conveniently access cash.

Many Scots continue to WANT to use cash BUT now often have to make a special journey to get it.

And even when cash can be found, it is now getting harder to use it, with more businesses disgracefully trying to impose “cashless” on the long-suffering Scottish public. Scots DESERVE better.

And they are going to get it.

Who says so?

Source: heraldscotland.com/news/26529639.scotland-cash-crisis-four-ten-scots-use-cash-control-spending

Businesses Will NOT Stop Accepting Cash!

Three weeks a year handling cash?!

Wow! What a horrifying headline!

Luckily, the reality is a little less daunting.

According to the research, those running small businesses spend about a half hour a day cash handling, including actually counting takings.

They then spend around one hour a week taking their on average £1738 to the bank.

Hardly surprising, considering how few truly local bank branches there are now.

To be honest, the time use identified in this article is NOT daunting. Many people run cash accepting business and never find it a problem.

Today, there are many inexpensive ways of handling cash, including counting it, efficiently. What’s more interesting is the reason businesses won’t give up accepting cash.

According to the research, 7 in 10 of businesses still view cash as king. SME owners estimate that 29% of the payments they receive are in cash, and 58% say their business would struggle if they only accepted cards.

29% of the payments they receive are in cash?

That really deserves a BIG WOW!

Thats a bit different to the 8% reported by bank trade association UK Finance.

Anyway, it’s refreshing to see that smart business people won’t stop accepting cash - because their customers WANT to use it.

Businesses striving to keep their customers satisfied!

Hallelujah!

Should banks such as Lloyds Banking Group try that sometime?

Hope springs eternal…

It will be interesting to read what Richard Lloyd thinks about that when he reports to HM Treasury on “Access to Banking Services”, UK-style….

Source: walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/admin-small-business-time-tendendo-34616560.amp

Post Office Cash Tracker Is NOT The Whole Story!

It is, of course, good that the Post Office has a “Cash Tracker”.

The only problem?

It does not give anything approaching the complete picture of the cash the UK public - us - use as we go about our daily lives.

That is in keeping with all the other data sets about cash produced by UK Finance, LINK Scheme Ltd, the Big Five UK Banks, the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority. All of them - at best - give only part of the total picture.

So let’s try to shed more light on how the Post Office is doing with cash at their counters and some comparisons with other cash channels.

In 2025, the total cash deposited at post office counters was between £33 and £35 billion. What % of total UK cash deposits were made at post office counters in 2025?

The figure is not published, like most figures related to cash, unless they help create the illusion favoured by the Big Five UK banks that cash is “dying”.

Turning to cash withdrawals, the total cash withdrawn at those same post office counters was between £10 billion and £12 billion.

Let’s use the higher figure of £12 billion.

The average value of a cash withdrawal at a post office counter is around £140.

So that means that there were roughly 85 million counter cash withdrawals at post office counters in 2025.

To put this into perspective, there were roughly 800 million LINK cash withdrawals made at UK ATMs in 2025 and a further roughly 96 million on-us ( bank customers using their own banks ATMs) cash withdrawals made at ATMs last year.

So total ATM cash withdrawal volume for 2025 - excluding credit card withdrawals- was around 896 million.

Given that the total number of post office counter cash withdrawals was only 85 million, this means that those counters provided less than 10% of the number of withdrawals made at ATMs.

What does that mean?

Put bluntly, that anyone who says that post office counters can replace ATMs as a source of cash for the UK public is either totally bonkers - or an obvious liar.

Which explains why only 4% of the UK public told YouGov in May this year that they support the phasing out of 24/7 ATMs in favour of cash access being solely via post office counters.

Yet that is exactly the direction in which HM Treasury and the Big Five UK banks continue to push - and which meets their definition of “reasonable” cash access.

We don’t know if this will all emerge from the Richard Lloyd chaired Access to Banking Services Review.

BUT emerge it will.

WE guarantee it.

A Good Future For Cash In The UK

“Future of cash in UK explained…” by UK Finance?

This isn’t an explanation.

It’s a wish list, prepared by an organisation that counts amongst its most important members - and funders - the same banks that have determinedly been making cash much less conveniently accessible for more than a decade, as well as “encouraging” businesses not to accept cash.

Even if one accepts the UK Finance estimate of 3.9 billion being the number of cash payments in 2025 - they are not going to come up with a high estimate, are they? - the “explanation” is not quite as they portray it.

When YouGov, on behalf of the Payment Choice Alliance, conducted a survey on cash use in May 2026, it emerged that 72% of adults had used cash in the last month and around 40% had used cash weekly or more frequently.

40% of the UK adult population is around 23 million regular cash users.

Of the 3.9 billion cash payments estimated by UK Finance, around 3 billion are carried out by these 23 million regular users.

Which means, on average, each of those 23 million regular cash users made around 130 cash payments in 2025.

That is NOT a small or insignificant number.

The other questions YouGov put to the UK public on behalf of the Payment Choice Alliance - questions that would NEVER be asked by UK Finance - concerned, firstly, support for a “cashless” UK and , secondly, support for legislation obliging the acceptance of cash.

Only 10% of UK adults supported the UK becoming a “cashless” society when asked in May 2026, as against 12% in 2023.

Yes. Support for “cashless” is actually FALLLING.

As regards, the UK publics support for legislation obliging the acceptance of cash, 72% supported in 2026, as against 71% in 2023.

To sum up these numbers, 23 million regular cash users made on average 130 cash payments in 2025; in 2026, only 6 million UK adults in any way support the UK becoming a “cashless” society; and around 42 million UK adults support legislation being passed to oblige cash acceptance.

You will NOT get such figures from UK Finance OR LINK Scheme Ltd OR HM Treasury OR the Bank of England OR the Financial Conduct Authority OR ANY other organisation in the UK.

They don’t ask the questions because they don’t want to face up to the answers.

THAT GAME IS UP.

There is a new Prime Minister in Downing Street and a new Chancellor at HM Treasury.

Andy Burnham in particular seems to give the truth a high priority.

He knows where to come for the truth about cash - the Payment Choice Alliance

Source: walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/future-cash-uk-explained-make-34480722.amp

Hawick - Like Thousands Of Other Communities - Deserves MUCH Better!

As usual, far too little, far too late.

Hawick lost two bank branches - and their 24/7 ATMs - in 2025.

The last bank branch in town, a Lloyds Banking Group Bank of Scotland branch, will close - and have its 24/7 ATM removed - next month.

This will leave Hawick High Street with no bank branch and no 24/7 ATM.

And all the town is getting is a “temporary” Banking Hub until a permanent site is found.

This temporary Banking Hub is NOT on the High Street and presumably will have no 24/7 ATM.

Cash Access UK should have been instructed by LINK Scheme Ltd and the Financial Conduct Authority to use one of the deserted bank branches in Hawick High Street as a PERMANENT Banking Hub.

The obvious - and correct solution - in such circumstances is for the closing “last branch in town” to automatically become the new Banking Hub, with a 24/7 ATM.

I am sure LINK Scheme Ltd and the Financial Conduct Authority will say “we have no powers to order Cash Access UK [owned by four of the Big Five UK Banks] to take over abandoned bank branches”.

THEN GET THOSE POWERS FROM HM Treasury.

HM Treasury has FAILED to safeguard 24/7 cash access and FAILED to safeguard community banking services.

Thousands of communities around the UK are suffering as a result of those failures.

Do the public from those communities - millions of them - have to come to 1 Horseguards to make HM Treasury understand the extent of their failures?

Just let us know.

Source: thesouthernreporter.co.uk/business/access-to-cash-will-continue-in-borders-town-as-banks-close-their-doors-8961538

Busy Bank Branches Closed, As Banks Are Economic With The Truth!

This is an article from the Daily Record in 2018.

A quote.

“Customer numbers at closure-threatened RBS branches are up to 20 times higher than those suggested by official bank figures, a Sunday Mail investigation has found.”

The story is absolutely 100% CORRECT.

The Payment Choice Alliance has visited communities up and down the UK and have discovered the same “incompetence” when banks issue customer numbers.

This story broke at exactly the same time as our Chair Ron Delnevo was telling the BBC that thousands of free-to-use ATMs would be lost due to the LINK Scheme Ltd being allowed to reduce the already tiny payments to ATM operators for each cash withdrawal.

The Bank of England said Ron was scaremongering.

The outcome? Well over 20,000 free-to-use ATMs have been lost.

The banks didn’t want the ATMs ripped out when they closed branches replaced. So payments to ATM operators had to be too low to allow replacement.

Let’s be completely transparent.

This is NOT about “incompetence”.

The UK public have been consistently LIED to for YEARS.

What COULD have been the future of bank branches is made crystal clear by the statistics on internet shopping.

Today in the UK, around 28% of retail purchases are made via the internet.This peaked at around 37% during covid. It has never been above 40%.

If retailers like Marks and Spencer had taken the same approach as the major UK banks,they could have simply moved their whole business to the Internet,telling us nobody is using their branches any more.

87% of UK adults make some purchases on the Internet - roughly the same percentage as have smartphones - so Marks and Spencer’s could simply have decided to try to force those 87% to shop only online by closing their high street branches down.

Why didn’t Marks and Spencer close all their branches down, forcing their customers online?

BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT GUARANTEE OTHER RETAILERS WOULD DO THE SAME.

The banks haven’t had the same problem.

All of the Big Five UK banks decided,effectively simultaneously,to close their branches down and rip out ATMs.

If one bank - Charlie Nunn and his Lloyds Banking Group ? - had decided to go against this trend, it would not have played out as it has.

Branch customers numbers would have been down because of the Internet and apps, BUT if banks had worked at attracting customers to their branches, as Marks and Spencer do as retailers, those branches could have been enjoying a good percentage of the footfall they had before the internet came along.

How high? 50%? 60%? 70%?

We won’t see an estimate from the banks BUT a recent Post Office Ltd survey revealed that 48% of adults had used in-person banking in the last month - and that in a situation where there are almost no bank branches now!

I have no idea how much of the truth about what’s happened in relation to branch banking in the UK will be revealed by the HM Treasury Access to Banking Services Review, Chaired by Richard Lloyd.

We shall see.

If PM Andy Burnham does want the full facts, he knows where we are.