no connotation of using the Web in the term disintermediation
Thanks, Faldage. Your argument makes sense to me. But ATMs are a boon to banks (and perhaps, inadvertently, to their customers as well) because they free up life-and-blood tellers who have to be trained and salaried and enrolled in profit-draining benefit plans.

The Internet model was driven from the opposite end of the equation as dot coms like Amazon reasoned that customers would abandon traditional retail channels if they could save time and money ordering for themselves online. This was a reprise of the catalogue sales model pioneered by Sears Roebuck a century ago but that model has not been described as "disintermediation" (as far as I know) and the term only came into being in the Internet era.

Dis is the way things are nowadaze.