Cash, in Italy for 4 million people, withdrawing them is a feat

For 4 million Italians, withdrawing cash is not easy at all: 7% of the population lives in three thousand Municipalities where there are no bank branches with their ATMs. If the obligation to accept electronic payments envisaged by the first maneuver of the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, presented to Parliament will take effect above or below 60 euros we will have to wait for the negotiations with the European Union, but for a good portion of Italians having cash in their hands is more complicated than expected.

To line up all the numbers was the Autonomous Italian Banking Federation (Fabi) which has cross-referenced data from the Bank of Italy on the diffusion of ATMs (automatic withdrawal counters) with Istat statistics on the population: the region in which the highest percentage of the population is not reached by a bank is Piedmont (13.8%), but “if in the North the banking desertification affects 6% of the population, the phenomenon is more limited in the Center (3.2%), in the South and in the islands, where the question is decidedly more markedcitizens who no longer have a banking agency ‘close to home’ or within a short distance represent the 10.7% of residents”.

The absolute figures make quite an impression: in Campania 700,000 Italians live without having a branch in their own municipality; in Lombardy there are 483 municipalities without banks for over half a million people uncovered. Certainly in these municipalities ‘unbanked‘ there may be Poste Italiane ATMs, but there is a profound difference in the diffusion of ATMs: they are registered throughout Italy 33,000 ATMs in bank branches and only 8,107 in 12,761 post offices, as can be seen from reading the budget 2021 of Poste Italiane. In short, even if we want to completely fill the gap, there is still work to be done.

The government raises the threshold for refusing payments with the POS to 60 euros

In the latest draft of the budget law, the ceiling under which merchants and professionals are no longer forced to accept digital payments rises from 30 to 60 euros

The ECB’s beacon on access to cash

Even the European Central Bank has lit a lighthouse on access to cash. In the summer, the Eurosystem published a detailed study conducted in the 19 countries of the area, without however being able to disclose the unpacked results for each nation (with the exception of a focus on Austria). “The share of the population with cash access points is uneven across countries. The percentage of people living within a 5 km radius of the access point to the nearest cash varies from 77 per cent in the country with the lowest coverage to 100 per cent in the country with the highest coverage., it is read. Central banks and authorities, it is highlighted, “they do not yet have an analytical tool to determine if the current distribution of cash access points is optimised from the point of view of the public interest” and this therefore leads to imbalances between large and small centers that can count on a different number of ATMs.

The ECB also wondered about the perception of citizens when it comes to access to cash. “In general – it is read – in most countries, citizens considered it easy (“very easy” or “rather easy”) to access cash via ATMs. On average, in the area, 89 percent of respondents considered it easy to obtain cash from an ATM. Only one in ten respondents rated access to cash via ATMs as “rather difficult” (7 per cent) or “very difficult” (2 percent). The countries with the highest share of respondents who found ATM access difficult were Malta (21 per cent), Greece (17 per cent), Lithuania (16 per cent) and Belgium (15 per cent)”.