Lower ATM operating revenue in the U.K. and Australia helped depress Q3 earnings revenue for Cardtronics, the world’s largest owner of ATMs. Late Thursday (Nov. 1), the company reported a 15 percent year-over-year decline in total revenue to $340.2 million.
ATM operating revenue, meanwhile, declined 15 percent year over year to $329.8 million, Cardtronics said in its Q3 financials. North American ATM operating revenue increased 3 percent, but was offset by lower revenue in the U.K. and Australia. The year-over-year decline in ATM operating revenue for Q3 was “approximately flat, excluding the impact from the removal of ATMs at 7-Eleven locations in the U.S.,” Cardtronics said. When excluding the impact of 7-Eleven, total revenue declined 1 percent year over year.
In 2015, 7-Eleven announced that it would not renew its Cardtronics relationship in the U.S. — the convenience store chain had worked with Cardtronics since 2007 for its ATM machines. Cardtronics, as part of its second-quarter earnings announcement, said it began the transition to 7-Eleven’s new service provider during the third quarter of 2017, and that the transition ended in February of this year.
“Increased Allpoint and bank-branded transactions across many of our retailers drove 3 percent growth in our North America business, excluding the impact from 7-Eleven,” said Cardtronics CEO Edward H. West.
Meanwhile, the U.K. and other places continue to move away from the use of cash. According to a recent report, consumers there used their debit cards 13.2 billion times in 2017, an increase of 14 percent compared to the year before. The report by UK Finance, the trade body for the U.K. banking and financial services sector, also showed that the number of cash transactions fell by 15 percent to 13.1 billion transactions during the same period.
In addition, the use of contactless payment cards almost doubled to 5.6 billion transactions, with 63 percent of people in the U.K. now using them.
Meanwhile in Australia, the balance seems to be tilting away from cash, with contactless card-based payments powering close to a third of point-of-sale (POS) transactions, according to PYMNTS research. The country has a high concentration of ATMs — at 135 ATMs per 100,000 people, the country had the second-highest penetration of ATMs in the Asia-Pacific region, after South Korea, according to a recent PYMNTS Global Cash Index™ Australia analysis.
Still, consumers in Australia are embracing contactless tap-and-go payments. “Australians’ relationship with their cash is in flux — sometimes, for the better,” that PYMNTS report said. “For all the hubbub surrounding digital payment innovations, cash remains an integral part of the Australian economy. In fact, the real value of all cash in circulation is growing at an annual rate of 6 percent.”
Back at Cardtronics, the company noted that same-store withdrawal transactions in the U.S. were up 6 percent compared to the prior year. For the whole year of 2018, Cardtronics said it expected revenue of between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion.