A Brief History Of ATMs
ATMs have been around for almost a quarter of a century, but fees, especially double fees, for using them are a more recent phenomenon.
When ATMs were introduced in the 1970s, they were set up only inside or immediately outside their banks' branch offices. They were seen by banks largely as a way of saving money, by reducing the need for tellers. Even with the relatively expensive computer technology of the late '70s and early 80s, the cost of processing deposits and withdrawals via ATMs proved to be less than the cost of training and employing tellers to do the same work.
To encourage customers to embrace the technology and overcome their trepidations about putting their checks into a machine's slot rather than a teller's hands, banks originally didn't charge customers any fees for using ATMs. (Indeed, in time, some banks started charging customers for not using ATMs, through so-called "human teller fees" - a charge for each time a customer uses a teller for a service that could be performed by an ATM.)
Banks that embraced the ATM profited handsomely, often growing far faster than old-fashioned banks in the effort to get business from ordinary Americans.
At first, a bank's ATMs could only be used by consumers who already had checking or savings accounts with that bank, through the bank's "proprietary ATM network."
However, by the early 80s, banks began to take advantage of improvements in telecommunications technology and formed "shared ATM networks" with other banks, allowing customers of one bank to withdraw money by using ATMs of other banks. Banks paid other ATM owners "interchange" fees, to cover the marginal cost of the "off-us" transactions by its customers on the owner's machines. Banks ...