Pin code and ATM inventor John Goodfellow said he earned just £10 for the trouble

James Goodfellow has not received any money since the patent was applied on May 2 1996

Half a century since the PIN was introduced, it is now being replaced by contactless cards (Getty)

The man behind pin technology, which allows customers to withdraw cash from ATMs, has never earned any money from it 50 years later.

James Goodfellow, 79, changed the face of banking with the Personal Identification Number (Pin) a coded card with a personal number allowing anyone to withdraw money from cash machines. The technology is still used in millions of ATMs around the world.

However, Goodfellow said he has earned just $15 (£10) - $1 for each country he signed the patent licence to - since the patent was applied on May 2, 1996. He has not received any money since.

“You can imagine how I feel when I see bankers getting £1 million bonuses. I wonder what they contributed to the banking industry more than I did to merit a £1 million bonus. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but that’s the way of the world,” he told Guardian Money.

The law changed in 1977 so that an employer inventor had to be compensated if they had an exceptionally successful invention, he said.

“What I fell victim to is that as a research and development engineer, it was part of my job to invent things. My invention in 1966 was 11 years too early. They were happy to take the invention and made a lot of money from royalties around the world,” Goodfellow said.

But the inventor, who went on to work at IBM for 26 years, said recognition is more important than financial reward.

Goodfellow was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to banking as “patentor of the personal identification number”.

Half a century since the PIN was introduced, it is now being replaced by contactless cards.

In total, £7.75 billion was spent in one billion contactless card transactions in 2015 alone, the UK Cards Association said. That's three times the total spent in 2014 and more than double the combined amount for the previous seven years.