At the end of 2021, 10.4% of the population aged at least 15, i.e. just over 5.47 million people, lived in a municipality with no ATM or private access point, according to the Bank of France.
The decline observed for several years continues. According to the latest Banque de France report, published on Monday, the number of ATMs continues its inexorable decline in France. At the end of December 2021, 47,853 automatons dotted the national territory, i.e. 978 less than a year earlier on the same date.
This drop of 2% is certainly a little less marked than in past years, when it rose to 3.2% in 2020 and 4.1% in 2019. However, it remains notable in all municipalities, with the exception of the most small. At the end of last year, there were 199 ATMs in towns with fewer than 500 inhabitants, a slight increase of 4.7%. Conversely, the larger towns and villages have all seen the number of distributors fall, by more than 2% for municipalities with 500 to 999 inhabitants and those with more than 10,000 inhabitants.
At the end of 2021, only 6,548 municipalities had at least one ATM, according to the Banque de France, i.e. less than one in five across France. An assessment almost identical to that of the end of 2020. Small villages are, unsurprisingly, the least covered: almost all people living in a municipality of less than 1000 inhabitants do not have an ATM on their territory. Conversely, the rate of people living in a city with at least one automaton climbs to 33.4% for municipalities between 1,000 and 2,000 inhabitants, then jumps around 100% for cities with more than 5,000 inhabitants.
Stable coverage thanks to private access points
This overall finding of a decline in ATMs must however be qualified by the gradual rise of private access points, accessible only to network customers, such as Crédit Mutuel relay points. The latter were deployed in all municipalities: there were 25,949 at the end of the year, up 3.2% over twelve months, including in the smallest villages.
Once these two elements are added together, the number of cash access points stabilizes at 73,802, down very slightly compared to the end of 2020.Between the end of 2018 and the end of 2021, the proportion of private relays increases in the cash distribution offer compared to ATMs and we observe the appearance of independent ATMs, in particular, in 2021, even if the volume of this park remains quite marginalsums up the Banque de France. “The decrease in the number of distributors is concentrated in the most populated and best equipped cities, reflecting an optimization of existing facilities in these territories and therefore not likely to alter accessibility indicators“, she adds.
However, a large part of the population has no access to cash: while just under 20% of municipalities have at least one ATM on their territory, a quarter of them only have one access point. private, and 56.4% have neither. In other words, 10.4% of the population aged 15 or over, or just over 5.47 million people, live in a municipality with no ATM or private access point. And, according to the Banque de France, last December, 5% of French people lived 10 minutes by car from the nearest automaton, the average, for an inhabitant of an unequipped municipality, being 8, 1 minute ride. A stable figure since 2018.
Access to cash remains a thorny subject, which had aroused the anger ofyellow vestsseeing it as the symbol of the desertification of small towns across the territory. Since then, alternative solutions have appeared, such as the arrival of distributors in tobacconists. The Covid-19 epidemic marked the year 2021, concludes the Banque de France in its report, welcoming that “the robustness of the territory’s banknote supply circuits has been demonstrated throughout this crisis».
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