On a mild September day in 2015, a man walked into Walsall shopping centre in the West Midlands and headed straight for the local NatWest branch.
In his hands were a number of black bin bags filled to the brim but not immediately suspicious to those around him. As he reached his destination, however, the bags burst under the weight of their load and out fell £700,000 in cash.
Rather than raise alarm bells among NatWest staff, the branch’s employees helped the man to repack the notes into sturdier hessian sacks before the cash was taken to the bank’s safe.
The huge deposit was made by Bradford jeweller Fowler Oldfield, which lodged more than £260m in cash at NatWest branches over a five-year period. At times, the quantities were so large they filled two floor-to-ceiling safes at the Walsall branch and excess amounts had to be stored elsewhere.
Despite the Yorkshire jeweller only having an annual turnover of around £15m, NatWest failed to report the lodgements as suspicious before 2016, when police said they were investigating Fowler Oldfield.
In 2021, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) took NatWest to court, where the FTSE 100 bank was hit with a criminal conviction and a £265m fine for breaching anti-money laundering regulations over the deposits.
It turned out that the huge sums were the proceeds of an alleged money laundering scheme. Clare Montgomery, the barrister acting for the FCA, said in court, dismayed: “Someone was walking through the streets with black bin liners of cash.”
The case exemplified concerns that Britain’s lenders were not doing enough to prevent money laundering, especially when it came to cash transactions.
However, amid regulatory pressure there are now growing fears that banks are becoming overly zealous against cash. Last week, The Telegraph revealed that NatWest was imposing new limits on cash deposits and withdrawals. The move has fuelled warnings that banks are forcing customers towards a “cashless society”, threatening to leave millions of people shut out from accessing basic financial services and triggering a political backlash amid privacy concerns.
‘Sleepwalking into a cashless society’
The decline of cash is a phenomenon that has been taking place for much of the 21st century.
The rise of digital payments, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, which allow users to pay for goods and services with a wave of their mobile phones, have made notes and coins an inconvenience for many.
Data from the Bank of England shows that cash use for everyday transactions has been declining rapidly for at least a decade, falling from over 50pc of all transactions in 2010 to just 15pc in 2021. Meanwhile, nearly a third of all payments in the UK were made via contactless methods in 2021, according to UK Finance.
