The Bankomat
1967 · Cash Dispenser Safe Unit · Work 754 of 1,871
The safe cabinet of a cash dispensing machine of 1967 in the back room behind the outer wall of a savings bank in Sweden, an iron cabinet one hundred and twenty centimetres high and wide and seventy centimetres deep, enamelled grey-white, two doors with a dark horizontal band across the middle carrying two chromed lever handles, the right door swung wide open, inside two assemblies of bare pale grey metal and a flat cassette in which paper money lies singly between two clear plastic bands, seen edge-on, a bundle of white cables running from the cabinet into the wall, a technician seen from behind in a grey work coat, one fluorescent tube overhead.
- What it was used for
- The Bankomat paid out cash outside opening hours. It was built by Metior of Malmö, a company in the Tetra Pak group. The study "The History of the Swedish ATM: Sparfrämjandet and Metior" dates the first machine to 6 July 1967 in Uppsala at Upsala Sparbank, where it was made operational and shown to the press; the public could use it 24 hours a day from September 1967. The driving force was Sparfrämjandet, the savings banks' promotion and central purchasing body: it wanted to relieve teller work and to pay out cash when branches were closed. The Mark 2 and 3 series read steel cards with punched holes; the Mark 4 used a magnetic stripe developed by the French Société Générale d'Automation.
- What was new
- What was new was less the machine than the sponsorship: the order came not from a single large bank but from the savings banks' joint purchasing body, and that turned a one-off into a production run — 5 prototypes in early 1968, then an order for 20 machines in spring 1968. By February 1970, per the same source, 178 had been delivered: 37 for the Swedish market, 24 of them delivered to savings banks, and 141 for export. The barb is in that ratio: most Metior machines went abroad. The ATM Industry Association lists the Bankomat among those challenging the claim of IBM's 1973 machine, built to Lloyds Bank's specifications, to be the first online cash dispenser; per the Swedish study, Metior delivered the first machine connected on-line to the Malmö computer centre as early as August 1968.
What the sources leave open: The Swedish study puts the gap to Enfield at one week in its introduction and at nine days in section 3.2 (27 June to 6 July 1967).