This consultation closed on 26 February 2021, and we have published our response.
We issued Specific Direction 8 (SD8) to LINK in October 2018. We said we would review it after 12 months and (if still in place) after 24 months. We published the findings of our first review in March 2020 and are now conducting our second review.
As SD8 has now been in place for a little over two years, we want to make sure that it is still working as well as it can. In this Call for Views, we invite you to submit your views on four areas:
- How well LINK fulfilled requirements under SD8 for implementing policies, reporting publicly, maintaining coverage of Protected ATMs, and providing clear and transparent information.
- How well the requirements under SD8 have worked in practice in relation to protecting free-to-use ATMs.
- How well LINK’s requirements under SD8 (for example, Direct Commissioning and the Low-Volume Premium) have worked in maintaining broad geographic access.
- Whether SD8 should remain in place, given some of the recent wider initiatives that have been introduced.
These include LINK’s ATM Community Request scheme and Retail Centre policy, the Community Access to Cash pilot scheme, provision of banking services at Post Office branches, as well as newer initiatives such as the potential introduction of cashback without purchase and shared-banking services like OneBanks.
