In recent years, tourist municipalities have been filled with street ATMs outside the bank branches. Above all, they proliferate, and are increasing, in areas of highest consumption, in visible places, busy streets and in crowded areas where there are few bank tellers nearby. They are installed in shops, hospitality establishments, hotels and large commercial areas. Despite charging very high commissions, sometimes around abuse, their number continues to grow day by day, driven by a progressive decrease in the “traditional” services of banking entities and taking advantage of their low maintenance cost. Most of them are embedded in business premises that request them. Others appear on exempt sites, sometimes in the middle of a sidewalk.
The firms specialized in the ATM sector – the acronym for ATM in English – offer very advantageous conditions for those who request these cash machines, which are a guarantee of public passage: Free installation of line, advertising supports or furniture, and even some firms they compensate with a rent.
To carry out this type of installation, a municipal building license and the payment of a fee for public road occupancy are required, but city councils have detected a certain “elasticity” of companies when it comes to complying with the regulations. In fact, the number of infractions grows almost at the same time that these ATMs appear on the street. There are not only problems due to the lack of a building license in private spaces with a built-in ATM. The enormous proliferation of street ATMs that work with all the global credit card networks such as visa, mastercard or servired, has led to the fact that they even involve a direct business located on the street – as telephone booths used to be -, without being linked to a specific business or, of course, have requested municipal authorization. They are not only illegal – a situation in which they can regularize their activity if they are linked to a private space – but also illegal: they must be demolished.
The city councils have begun to initiate urban infringement files and when the machines, which in many cases also have the capacity to change currency, are legalized, they begin to charge the rate for occupation of public roads. In the Torrevieja case, it is the urban planning inspection brigade that has already demanded the withdrawal of some of these facilities. Especially since companies have had no qualms about locating them directly on sidewalks, interrupting the path of pedestrians, knowing that they need an authorization that, if requested, will be denied. Last November, the City Council began a demolition file for an ATM located on the plot of a law firm on Avenida de Alfredo Nobel. Without much success.
There are no specific regulations for this use on public roads, so the infringement files use the same terminology as when they refer to any urban action, such as an extension of a house, terrace or swimming pool and demand its “demolition” under threat of fines. coercive and administrative. In Benidorm, the presence of ATMs on the street has also multiplied. In the middle of this year the municipal Inspection service began to examine the ATMs installed in public areas, both ATMs and those linked to different banking entities, reaching fifty sanctioning acts, with proposals for fines that reach 1,000 euros, for being in an irregular situation. Likewise, companies were urged to regularize their situation, processing, among others, applications for an opening license in accordance with the provisions of municipal ordinance number 2 on the Use of Public Use Zones. As confirmed by municipal sources, these sanctioning files are in the appeal phase, which the City Council will now have to resolve.
A few machines with cash too exposed
The location of ATMs on sidewalks, without being embedded, has the advantage of being free and choosing the best place – usually a large urbanization without financial entities. And some downsides. The fact that the municipalities have put the batteries to sanction has joined the action of criminal gangs specialized in starting the machines with the help of boom trucks.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.