The eyes have it

THEY are, in the view of Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, the only useful financial innovation of recent decades. Better yet, cashpoints (ATMs, to Americans) are still evolving. This week Citibank unveiled one that can identify account-holders by scanning their irises, thus doing away with codes—and with cards, for that matter. Customers request funds via their phones before confirming their identity with a scan.

Nearly half a century since the cashpoint came into service, its origin is still disputed. Barclays, a British bank, often gets the credit for installing the first one, at its Enfield branch in 1967. Its future is just as uncertain: those who think plastic and, increasingly, mobile phones are displacing cash one transaction at a time see little need for either paper money or the machines that dispense it.

In fact, cashpoints are still multiplying. Nearly 200,000 were installed in 2014, taking the global total to over 3m, says RBRLondon, a British consultancy. Much of the rise is in emerging markets; Europe and America are barely growing. Diebold and NCR, both American firms, and Wincor Nixdorf of Germany, still make most of them, however.

A few do novel things, such as selling gold or tickets to football matches. Some double as share-trading machines, or allow users to withdraw bitcoin. Airports have cash machines that spew holiday money, usually at lousy rates. A bakery in New York, Sprinkles, has built what it calls a cup-cake ATM. But cash is still king when it comes to dispensers. Most cashpoints do a limited number of things in increasingly sophisticated ways, whether it be switching languages or letting customers pick the notes they want.

In retrospect, cashpoints have typically revealed preferences that only seem obvious later on. In America, many banks initially operated ATMs only during normal business hours, much as supermarkets use self-checkout machines today. But a blizzard in 1978 prompted Citibank to keep them open around the clock as human tellers struggled to get to work. The slogan it launched that year, “The Citi never sleeps”, underscored how the demands of customers had ceased to coincide with the hours bankers kept. Will iris scanning catch on? Citibank is taking the long view.