Drawing cash from a person at a counter · Ceded (since 1967)

Barclays opens the world's first cash machine at its Enfield Town branch in north London on 27 June 1967, paying out up to ten pounds against a voucher and a four digit code.

This entry needs its nuance stated first. The cash machine did not destroy the counter job: it cut the staff needed to run a branch, branches became cheaper, banks opened more of them, and full-time teller employment in the United States held up and even grew into the 2000s, as James Bessen documented. What was ceded is the transaction itself, handing over a slip and receiving notes from a person, which almost nobody does now. The decline of the teller came later, with the telephone and then the pocket screen, not with the machine in the wall. What is not ceded is the conversation that happens at a branch about a mortgage, a fraud, a death in the family, and the handling of cash for people who cannot use a machine at all.