Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Thursday

the 30th of May. I'm at London Waterloo Station again but I'm not on the concourse about to

complain about the terrible state of the railways no I am in well effectively, well, effectively, the baggage bit at the end. If you were

in the big station and you look right over to the right, I'm in effectively the excess baggage

centre where you can buy bags, you can leave them, whatever you need to do. But I'm also staring

at a machine. It's a really big, beefy ATM.

And it looks as though you could probably put a card in and get some money out, but you can't.

This is currency exchange. I'm here with Kaya Needenthal. He is the Director of International Payments for Currency

Online Group. Kaya, this is your machine. What's it doing?

Yes, hello Simon. So we're located right inside excess baggage in Walsallu Station and this

machine here is an ATM for cash-to-cash transactions is the first one in the UK at the moment.

So predominantly it's for commuters who come through the station and would like to purchase

currency. There's no actual other options available on the concourse here. So we've sought out

this spot with excess baggage and network rail and customers can come here to exchange their

pound sterling in cash and they can receive either euros or US dollars back in cash so you're

providing your currency exchange for people who are going on holiday conversely as well you

have tourists here coming in and they can sell their their foreign currencies whether that be

euros US dollars Swiss francs

or many other currencies available and they can get pound sterlings in return for their trip

and time in London. So the customer comes in, selects what they want to do and goes through the

process. It's all run on facial recognition. So it's sort's a tokenised system and that's obviously all for

compliance and AML, anti-money laundering, which is the highest concern in the world of currency

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