Alastair Hanton, who died at the age of 94, was the inventor of direct debit, one of the founders of National Girobank and a tireless activist for causes ranging from sustainable transport to Christian Aid.

It was in 1964, as an executive at Unilever, that Hanton found a solution to the problem of collecting variable payments from thousands of ice cream vendors – by obtaining permission to collect the money directly from their accounts. bank rather than waiting for checks. or by relying on standing orders.

The big banks were reluctant to cooperate with what they saw as interference in long established processes. “There was a battle,” Hanton recalls. “I had many meetings with suffocating bankers but little by little, with persistence, I exhausted them” – and the direct debits became widespread in 1968.

That same year, Hanton became founding director of National Giro, a payment system (direct from account to account) set up at the instigation of the Labor government to meet the needs of the mass of “unbanked” workers and beneficiaries. of social security through the More than 20,000 branches of the General Post.

Fully computerized and Bootle-based, this was another radical development in consumer financial services – and after rebranding itself as National Girobank in 1978, it broke new ground by becoming the first to offer free banking services to customers. who remained creditors. Hanton was its deputy managing director until his retirement in 1987.

Alastair Kydd Hanton was born in North London on October 10, 1926, the son of Peter Hanton – an architect for the Department of Public Works – and his wife Maude, née Evans. Alastair was educated at Mill Hill School which was evacuated to St Bees in Cumberland during the duration of World War II, and went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read math and economics – although, as one family member observed, “he also seemed to have studied kindness.”

In 1948 he was recruited into the newly founded Colonial (later Commonwealth) Development Corporation, and in due course he was posted to Nyasaland (Malawi) to plan public works projects.

After returning to England, Hanton joined the Industrial & Commercial Finance Corporation, a joint venture established by the Bank of England to provide long-term finance to mid-sized companies. From there he moved to Unilever’s economics and statistics division and, in the mid-1960s, to mining giant Rio Tinto; his specialty was the analysis of capital investment projects using the “discounted cash flow” methodology, which he helped develop.

Hanton later made a different name for himself as a cycling advocate – a passion since his school days, when he and his brother had cycled home from Cumbria and which he kept in London until ‘at the age of 90.

He campaigned vigorously for road safety, traffic calming and pedestrianization and – as chairman of the London Amenity & Transport Association in the 1980s – against what he saw as the threat of company cars , which not only clogged the streets of the capital, but attracted tax breaks equivalent to “doubling the entire subsidy to British Rail”.

During this time, Hanton served for many years as president of the Christian Aid charity and, through this connection, helped found the Fairtrade Foundation which seeks to improve the livelihoods of Third World farmers through to the “Fairtrade” label.

He also co-founded an Ethical Investing Research Service, established a small woodland ownership program, and for 60 years served modestly as the keeper-manager of his Methodist parish hall.

Although gentle in his manners, he was the epitome of the practical activist – asking in countless committee meetings, “But what are we really going to do?”

Alastair Hanton was appointed OBE in 1987.

He married, in 1956, Margaret Lumsden, who survives him with their daughter and two sons.

Alastair Hanton, born October 10, 1926, died May 26, 2021