Willie Sutton, the audacious American bank robber, is estimated to have robbed over 100 banks during his forty-year criminal career, in the early 20th century. After his arrest, he was asked by a reporter why he robbed banks. Sutton is said to have replied: “Because that’s where the moneyFrom the Latin word moneta, nickname that was given by Romans to the goddess Juno because there was a minting workshop next to her temple. Money is any item that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular region, country or socio-economic context. Its onset dates back to the origins of humanity and its physical representation has taken on very varied forms until the appearance of metal coins. The banknote, a typical representati... More is.”
The straightforward response has become a metaphor for focusing on the most obvious course of action. In medicine for instance, Sutton Law is a reminder to doctors diagnosing a patient’s symptoms, that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
But is the bank still where the money is? Or at least cashMoney in physical form such as banknotes and coins. More?
Denmark has not experienced a single bank robbery since 2001. Bank branches in Denmark no longer carry cash. On 15 September 2025, following the announcement by Austria-based Oberbank to cease providing cash services to its customers in Bavaria, Member of the European Parliament Rada Laykova asked the European Commission whether, if other banks were to follow Oberbank’s lead, this could effectively lead to the abolition of cash and whether the decision was compliant with European law.
In other terms are banks legally required to provide cash services? What once appeared self-evident now calls for legal scrutiny.
Access to cash offers a particularly revealing illustration. At both European and national levels, the right to withdraw cash is formally recognised, notably through access to a basic paymentA transfer of funds which discharges an obligation on the part of a payer vis-à-vis a payee. More account and the legal tenderMoney that is legally valid for the payment of debts and must be accepted for that purpose when offered. Each jurisdiction determines what is legal tender, but essentially it is anything which when offered (“tendered”) in payment of a debt extinguishes the debt. There is no obligation on the creditor to accept the tendered payment, but the act of tendering the payment in legal tender discharges the debt. More status of banknotes and coins. Yet the physical infrastructure enabling that access — automated teller machines, bank branches, cash logisticsThe term originates from military language and refers to the movement and provisioning of troops at war. In today’s business vocabulary, it refers to the management in particular, the transportation, storage and distribution of finished goods. More, and local withdrawal points — is not subject to any binding obligation of territorial availability at EU level. The cash infrastructure remains largely governed by market considerations.
The steady reduction of ATM networks across Europe is often framed as a rational adjustment to declining cash usage and digitalisation. While these trends are empirically documented, they obscure a deeper legal issue: the growing disconnect between formally recognised rights of access and the absence of binding obligations ensuring the material conditions of their exercise.
In such circumstances, the problem is not the absence of law, but the internal configuration of the legal norm itself: access to cash is formally recognised, while the legal order refrains from imposing any structural duty aimed at guaranteeing the existence and territorial distribution of the infrastructure necessary for its material exercise.
European banking law undeniably recognises access to cash as a legitimate legal concern. Through consumer protection instruments, payment services regulation and accessibility standards, the European Union has progressively framed access to cash as a component of financial inclusionA process by which individuals and businesses can access appropriate, affordable, and timely financial products and services. These include banking, loan, equity, and insurance products. While it is recognised that not all individuals need or want financial services, the goal of financial inclusion is to remove all barriers, both supply side and demand side. Supply side barriers stem from financial institutions themselves. They often indicate poor financial infrastructure, and include lack of ne... More.
The cornerstone of this framework lies in Directive 2014/92/EU — the Payment Accounts Directive (PAD) — which establishes a right of access to a basic payment account for consumers legally resident in the Union. Among the services attached to such an account, the directive expressly includes the possibility to withdraw and deposit cash. Access to cash is thus recognised as an integral component of minimum banking functionality, alongside deposits, transfers and card payments.
However, this recognition remains strictly functional. The directive guarantees access to a service — cash withdrawal — without addressing the conditions under which that service must be made available in practice. It does not impose any obligation on credit institutions to maintain a certain density of bank branches or ATMs, ensure territorial coverage, or preserve access points in less profitable or sparsely populated areas.
This structural limitation is particularly visible in the way European law approaches accessibility. Accessibility is not conceived as a requirement to ensure the existence of cash access infrastructure, but solely as a set of conditions governing how existing infrastructure must be designed and operated.
Directive (EU) 2019/882 — the European Accessibility Act — illustrates this approach with clarity. The directive imposes detailed technical and usability standards on ATMs, in order to ensure access for persons with disabilities. Accessibility is thus understood as a matter of conformity of infrastructure — its interfaces, physical design and modes of interaction — rather than as a question of availability or territorial presence. The regulatory concern lies in how access is organised once an access point exists, not in whether such an access point must exist.
In this sense, European law protects access to cash only downstream of infrastructure. It assumes the existence of ATMs and other withdrawal points without imposing any obligation to contribute or fund the infrastructure. Accessibility operates on the assumption of availability but does not contribute to producing it.
Taken together, these instruments protect access to cash where infrastructure exists, but do not guarantee that such infrastructure will exist. European law secures access as a formal entitlement and a technical interaction, not as a territorially guaranteed service. The result is a legal framework in which access to cash is recognised in principle yet remains materially contingent.
The situation described above calls for conceptual clarification. It requires an evaluation of the relationship between legal norms and their practical operation.
This evaluation is traditionally approached through the notions of efficacy and effectiveness, In legal theory, efficacy refers to the capacity of a law, legal measure, or remedy to produce its intended legal result under ideal or controlled conditions.[1] Effectiveness, by contrast, refers to the degree of realisation of legal rules in social practices, that is, the extent to which prescribed behaviours are actually adopted or implemented.[2]
Applied to access to cash, this distinction reveals a specific difficulty. From the standpoint of effectiveness, the legal framework is only partially realised: the right exists, but its exercise depends on infrastructure whose maintenance and distribution are not legally required. From the standpoint of efficacy, the objective of ensuring effective access to cash is only imperfectly attained, since the law does not organise the conditions necessary to secure that outcome.
From a strictly normative standpoint, the difficulty surrounding access to cash can be formulated precisely. The legal order prescribes an outcome — access to cash — while leaving unregulated the complementary action upon which its realisation depends, namely the maintenance and territorial distribution of cashActivity consisting of the delivery of cash throughout the territory in the amount and modality required to adequately cover the needs. It is one of the central bank’s core functions, for which the necessary logistics, materials and human resources are used, either in-house or outsourced. More infrastructure. This configuration constitutes a lacuna of modalities: a situation whereby a legal norm prescribes a result without determining the conditions necessary to bring it about.[3]
The problem is not that the law fails to speak, but that it speaks incompletely.
The absence of structural obligations in European banking law appears all the more striking when compared with regulatory approaches adopted in other network industries. In sectors such as postal services, telecommunications and energy, EU law has long accepted that market forces alone cannot guarantee equal access to essential services. Universal service obligations impose territorial coverage, continuity and affordability irrespective of profitability.[4]
Access to cash shares these structural characteristics. It is a prerequisite for access to essential goods and services, relies on physical infrastructure, and is particularly vulnerable to market failure in less profitable areas. From this perspective, the absence of comparable obligations in banking law appears increasingly difficult to justify.
Beyond the universal service framework, access to cash also raises a distinct regulatory issue: the concentration of control over cash distribution. Banks enjoy a de facto monopoly over the distribution of cash to the public, as no alternative organisation has the same access to central banks, or is capable of ensuring widespread access. From a regulatory perspective, monopoly power entails a special responsibility not to distort competition, reflecting the idea that market power carries corresponding obligations in the public interest.[5]
In the absence of EU-level obligations, several European states have adopted national measures aimed at protecting access to cash, including Austria, Ireland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands and Finland. These measures pursue objectives of financial inclusion and territorial equality, but remain fragmented and territorially bound. They operate as corrective mechanisms rather than as the expression of a harmonised European right to cash availability.
French law illustrates this dynamic. Access to cash is formally recognised through the right to a bank account and the definition of basic banking services under the Monetary and Financial Code. At the same time, a ministerial response in 2008 explicitly acknowledged that ATMs are not subject to public service obligations and that their deployment is market driven.[6]
This raises a further distributive question: who should bear the financial burden of maintaining cash infrastructure — consumers, banks, merchants, central banks or taxpayers? If cash contributes to public goods such as financial inclusion, systemic resilience and the protection of privacy, its preservation cannot be regarded as a purely commercial matter. In principle, goods that serve the public interest call for collective funding. Yet the current regulatory framework leaves the cost allocation largely to market actors.
Sutton’s Law presupposed that access follows the resource. Contemporary banking law reveals the collapse of this coincidence. Cash remains, rights are recognised, yet access is receding.
This dissociation does not amount to a legal vacuum. Access to cash remains situated within the legal order. What has changed is the intensity of legal constraint applied to its concrete organisation. The law affirms the entitlement but progressively refrains from governing its territorial realisation.
Seen from a sociological perspective, this configuration resonates with the concept of non-law developed by Jean Carbonnier: not the absence of law, but the easing of legal pressure, in which legal norms coexist with, and are partially supplanted by, other forms of constraint — economic profitability, logistical optimisation and territorial rationalisation. The non-law here is not the cause of inefficacy, but its social manifestation.[7]
The paradox is striking: as cash access infrastructure disappears, bank robberies decline. Yet a reduction in crime achieved through the erosion of lawful access cannot be equated with regulatory success.
Revisiting Sutton’s intuition thus leads to a final inversion: if banks are no longer robbed because access to cash is no longer practiced, the task of banking law is not to accept this equilibrium, but to restore the conditions under which access to cash can be both legally affirmed and materially guaranteed.
[1] A.-J. Arnaud (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Legal Theory and Sociology of Law, L.G.D.J., 1993, “Efficiency” entry.
[2] A.-J. Arnaud (ed.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Legal Theory and Sociology of Law, LGDJ, 1993, “Effectiveness” entry.
[3] O. Pfersmann, « Lacunes et complétudes », in D. Alland et S. Rials (dir.), Dictionnaire de la culture juridique, PUF, coll. « Quadrige », 2003, p. 911
[4] See, for example, Directive 2002/22/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 7 March 2002 on universal service and users’ rights relating to electronic communications networks and services (Universal Service Directive), OJ L 108, 24 April 2002, p. 51
[5] Case 322/81, Michelin v Commission [1983] ECR 3461, para. 57
[6] Ministerial reply to Written Question No. 17734 (Mr Morel-A-L’Huissier), Journal officiel de l’Assemblée nationale, Questions, 23 September 2008, p. 8208
[7] Interview with Jean Carbonnier: “Passion and Lightness in the Sense of Law”, interview conducted by Anna De Vita, pp. 647–676