Call for views: Second review of Specific Direction 8 (LINK)

28/01/2021

We are conducting our second annual review of Specific Direction 8 (SD8), which is designed to make sure LINK does all it can to fulfil its public commitments to maintain the broad geographic spread of free-to-use ATMs. We would like to hear your views on how well SD8 is working in practice.

We issued 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:

a. How well LINK fulfilled requirements under SD8 for implementing policies, reporting publicly, maintaining coverage of Protected ATMs, and providing clear and transparent information.

b. How well the requirements under SD8 have worked in practice in relation to protecting free-to-use ATMs.

c. How well LINK’s requirements under SD8 (for example, Direct Commissioning and the Low-Volume Premium) have worked in maintaining broad geographic access.

d. 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.

We welcome all responses at whichever level of detail you feel most appropriate to your understanding.

Please submit your responses by email to PSRcashaccess@psr.org.uk by 26 February 2021.

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