Name: Can ATMs Survive the Shift to a Cashless World?
Uploaded: 2026-03-07T17:37:11.000Z
Duration: 5 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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The banking world is entering a cashless age, driven by mobile and contactless payments.

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In 2024, contactless payments surged globally to the tune of $10 trillion across more than 450 billion global transactions.

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Online payments reached almost $13 trillion with over 200 billion transactions.

But as digital channels expand, the physical infrastructure we once depended on, like bank branches and ATMs is becoming less visible in people's daily lives.

According to research firm Datos Insights, there are close to 3 million ATMs in the world.

That's about 360 ATMs for every 1 million people.

Covid really accelerated people's use of digital banking.

If I were to compare it, say five years ago, there is a reduction in the people who use our machines.

In some nations, cashless spending has become routine, shaped by high trust in financial institutions, widespread smartphone adoption and robust digital payment infrastructure.

Sweden is often cited as the clearest example, with over 98% of its population owning a debit or credit card.

Other countries on the way to a cashless society include Norway, Finland, South Korea and Singapore.

Singapore is a prime example of this shift.

According to figures disclosed by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the nation's bank branches and ATMs have fallen by an average of 2% a year over the past decade.

And as of 2026 there are 150 retail branches and 1,600 off premise ATMs.

This follows a similar trend for most of Southeast Asia.

Bank branches in Indonesia, Brunei, Thailand and Malaysia have declined steadily in the last decade.

They're being replaced by services such as Singapore's PayNow, a digital payment system.

Launched in 2017, it allows users to transfer and receive funds using just their mobile number.

What government and monetary authorities Singapore have done in is build real time digital payment infrastructure.

So you build national Rails and then within those Rails you allow competition to happen at user experience.

So MAS has set standards and incentives, perhaps grants and support, but allowed banks and fintechs to innovate.

What we have done is that we've effectively looked at our top transactions that are done over the counter today.

The and these transactions used to comprise 80% of why people go to the branches and now we've moved them to the machines so that people can access them at their convenience.

24, 7 We've seen so many evolutions of customer behaviors so we've got the digital native generation right and they have never set foot into a branch.

It has to change because digital technologies are superior to physical infrastructure.

Because they have lower marginal cost, better scalability, they have Stronger data analytics.

So economic forces tell us this will keep moving in that direction and there is no going back.

Especially in an era where cyberattacks and natural disasters are increasingly common.

We can think of ATMs and physical infrastructure as a backup.

And that's where value of cash will still lie.

Even in a highly digital market like Singapore, cash is still common in certain settings, particularly through small value transactions or in the nation's traditional hawker centers.

When we look at where to place our ATMs, we look at a lot of factors.

We look at the demand of the area pop up.

ATMs are great in the sense that they are able to help us meet seasonal demand.

Across emerging economies, ATMs still play a crucial role.

Egypt and Uzbekistan are even expanding their networks, driven by the needs of rural and remote communities where Internet coverage remains uneven.

This happens around the world when you think of most emerging markets, when you think of South Asia, Africa, Latin America, even some Eastern European countries where we have unstable connectivity, irregular merchant acceptance and low digital literacy.

So you gotta think of what's the best hybrid approach, how to embed this physical infrastructure like ATMs into the digital customer journey.

ATMs are also upping their suite of services from biometric authentication and cash recycling to coin deposit machines.

But as they expand their capabilities, the maintenance behind them will need to become more advanced too.

Cybersecurity has grown so much because everything is going online.

A lot of people are trying to steal or attack.

So this is one of really good examples of the jobs that will come to the front line.

How to protect all these customers, all this data that is now digital on bank servers with AI and agentic AI.

What we are seeing is that we are incorporating them from for our staff to better assist our customers.

In the short term, a lot of jobs will be taken away by AI digitalization.

But then in intermediate and long term, what will happen as it happens usually in these revolutionary changes, new jobs will be created.

So while payment habits continue to evolve, ATMs are not disappearing, they're adapting to remain a meaningful part of the financial ecosystem.