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5:00Standing in Line at the ATM
You stick your card into a machine your bank has never met and walk away with £40 of someone else's cash. In the 8 seconds you waited, your bank quietly agreed to pay the machine's owner about 27p.
The cash dispenser in front of you is almost never owned by your bank. It belongs to a different bank, a supermarket, or an independent ATM deployer. So how does a Barclays card pull cash from a Halifax machine? In the UK, the answer is LINK, the shared network that nearly every card and nearly every machine plug into. LINK doesn't hold your money; it's a switchboard that lets your bank and the machine's owner talk and, later, settle up.
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