Now let's not forget that there are lots of transactions
made every day by cash and not by card.
However,
these often start as a card transaction at an automated teller
machine, or ATM, where the cardholder uses their payment card to
withdraw cash from their account.
These transactions are really similar to the retail
transactions we've already seen. Once the cardholder puts
their card into the ATM and enters their pin,
an authorization request is going to go from the bank that
operates the ATM to the cardholder's issuing bank.
Sometimes this goes by one of the card schemes, and sometimes
it just gets sent from one bank to another.
And in some countries, there's a national equivalent to the
card scheme just for ATM transactions.
But just as with a payment transaction, once the transaction has been authorized,
the cardholder's bank will send a response to the bank that runs the ATM.
And if the response is that the transaction is authorized,
the ATM will be instructed to dispense the cash to the
cardholder. At the end of the day,
the ATM owner will produce a clearing file and will
get settlements early the next day.
In some cases,
rather than the ATM being run by a bank, they're run by third‑party
companies. So the authorization message goes from the ATM to the
ATM operator and then to an acquirer,
just like a retail transaction. And then settlement comes
back the next day in the same sort of way.