SCOTTISH engineer James Goodfellow, the grandfather of the cash machine, has raised his worries about the ATM, which he fears has led to banks losing "the personal touch" and has raised concerns for the millions who are now reliant on them.

The 81-year-old from Paisley, came up with the eureka moment that changed the face of banking, by being the man who first patented automated cash machines that use pin numbers - and for years the only credit he received was a £10 bonus.

He lodged his patent in May 1966, more than a year before the first cash machine was ceremonially opened in a blaze of publicity.

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He said his invention had been blamed the move by banks to cut costs by axing staff and branches - but said that ATMs were not created to take the place of human contact.

Mr Goodfellow is concerned that the prospect of the closure of ATMs would be "serious" for a lot of people and especially pensioners.

Cutting ATMs would not be a good idea. It would be a great disservice to local people to lose a local machine they have come to rely on.

The prime mover for the cash machine was that in the early 1960s the banking union were wanting a five-day working week for their employee, which meant closing on a Saturday.

Of course, midweek, they closed at 3pm, so if they were closed on a Saturday, people could not get to the bank to get any cash. If you were salaried and the money went into your bank account, you had to get in on a Saturday morning to get money for the week ahead. The use of credit cards and debit cards was non-existent then.

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The banks were faced with a real dilemma. Which is why they were interested in an automated issuing service from a hole-in-the-wall 24/7.

It was meant to ensure customers could get their cash out of a bank when they wanted it.

Cash machines have taken the weight of people's banking requirements for the weekend, out-of-hours and people who could not get to a branch during the week.

Their growth was spectacular and as soon as we had LINK, and you could use your card on almost any cash machine and it was always free.

The banks had a cheap solution to manpower and convenience. They could install a cash machine in an outside wall and forget about it and their customers didn't go into a branch so the banks were not dealing directly with their customers.

Today you go into a bank and you don't know who the manager is, whereas once you did, the personal element has disappeared and the assumption is that we are all into smartphones and tablets and doing banking that way.

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I personally think the banks have lost the personal touch.

Now you have post offices disappearing at a fantastic rate and pensions which used to be collected from the post office in cash, are now getting paid to banks. It meant that pensioners could go to the closest cash machine to get their cash.

If ATMs are shut, pensioners especially in outlying areas may well have a real problem and are going to be hard hit, because the post offices are not coming back, and we know that bank branches are closing at a rapid rate.

If you start to cut the machines now then the poor old consumer is left high and dry.

It is okay for people who are doing online banking, that will help, although not for withdrawing cash, but for people in outlying areas with no access and perhaps not online it is going to be very difficult.

The cash machine and I have been blamed for the problems with banks including the 2008 financial crisis, because people were saying that they had taken their eye off the ball and were ignoring their customers and had become sales departments.

"But I don't think I could be to blame for that."