Paperless Statements Not Always Best Choice, Says New Report

HughPickens.com writes: Ann Carrns reports at the NYT that despite a push by financial institutions to switch customers to digital statements from paper, the traditional hard-copy version may work better for some people, in particuar particular, older, less educated and lower-income consumers who may lack fast Internet connections at home. According to a new report from the National Consumer Law Center, even consumers who know the Internet may simply prefer paper, because statement notifications can easily be overlooked in a deluge of email. Also unlike paper statements, which can be neatly collected and filed away, going paperless on multiple accounts will mean having that information scattered under different user names and passwords. You may also be surprised to learn you have to pay for copies of some older statements. "If you have a system for organizing your paper statements, you should think about how that's going to translate online," says Jim Bruene. Finally you may not be able to go back as far with paperless statements. At Verizon, cellphone customers get up to 12 months of past statements. Customers can also request older statements dating back seven years for $5 per copy.

Under federal law, banks must obtain consent from consumers to deliver statements electronically. But banks are sometimes aggressive in encouraging customers to opt out of receiving paper statements. Last summer, holders of some Chase credit cards received pop-up ads when they logged into their accounts online, asking them to switch to electronic statements. The notice said "Action Required," even though no action was necessary if cardholders simply wanted to continue receiving paper statements. The screen showed buttons for "accept" and "manage my preferences," but not for "decline."

Comments

Traditional banks are dead

[nospam007]

"the traditional hard-copy version may work better for some people, in particuar particular, older, less educated and lower-income consumers who may lack fast Internet connections at home. "

For bank statements a 1200/300 baud phone connection should be sufficient.

As long as I don't have to pay for it, I don't care if they send the manager over to their home to tell them what they have in their account.

My bank has 5 years of online statements available, so I download all of them for the past year when I do my taxes, since I need them anyway then.

In the last 3 years I have been twice to a bank to get foreign currency, the only thing that I can't do online and the only people who were there were oldsters with a plastic bag full of invoices that they wanted the clerk to transfer money to, but they have to pay 3,5€ for each of those, so I don't care.

My bank had previously 20 tellers, now they have 1 information girl and 1 teller on a simple desk, that's it, the banks of our fathers are dead.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[mh1997]

I was sued by a local business in small claims court. I brought in a printed copy of the electronic statement from my bank billpay with confirmation codes showing that I sent the online payment (the bank then cut a paper check and mailed it, the business was not set up for electronic payment). I also had a copy of the hard-copy, mailed statement from my bank with the same information. The judge did not accept my printed copy, he thought it was too easily faked. He did accept my hard-copy mailed statement from the bank and I won my case. This was small claims court, the rules are different than in other courts.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[spire3661]

Every time i go to Union Station in L.A., i look over to the empty bank teller section and a little part of me dies inside. Its such a huge symbol of a bygone era.

http://travelswithmaitaitom.co...

You can see what it looked like when it was in full-operation in Catch Me If You Can. Edit: For some reason Slashdot wont make the link hot.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[whoever57]

For bank statements a 1200/300 baud phone connection should be sufficient.

It should be, but just about every website has so much javascript running on it that very few websites would be usable through a 1200/300 baud phone line.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[stinerman]

See also the people who think faxes are inherently more secure than email attachments.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[nukenerd]

The judge did not accept my printed copy, he thought it was too easily faked. He did accept my hard-copy mailed statement from the bank

In the UK, bank statements printed off the Internet are not generally acceptable legally. However, that does not stop the banks and building societies from nagging us to "Go paperless". Here is an example from the Coventry Building Society. Under Identification Requirements to open an account, it says among the documentation required :

Bank/building society statement less than 3 months old (not from Coventry Building Society) and not printed off the internet - original document [My emphasis]

. Yet elsewhere on the website (and on statements) it says :

If you are registered for Online Services .... why not switch to paperless statements?

Hypocrites.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[nukenerd]

My bank has 5 years of online statements available, so I download all of them for the past year when I do my taxes, since I need them anyway then.

So you spent half an hour downloading them. I just pulled my paper copies from my filing cabinet.

In the last 3 years I have been twice to a bank ... and the only people who were there were oldsters with a plastic bag full of invoices that they wanted the clerk to transfer money to,

WTF has this got to do with paperless statements? I have paper statements and have not been inside my bank for about 15 years (since I moved to a new area). I do not even know offhand where it is now, as I did receive a notice that it had moved too.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[HiThere]

For bank statements, paper copy works better for *me*. I don't trust on-line security, so I will not set up on-line access to my bank account, and that means I can't get on-line statements.

I'm sure that with a decent bank all the transactions that don't involve the exchange of physical money can be handled on-line. Now convince me that it can be done safely. There were several SSH vulnerabilities last year, and I'm rather sure I've heard of one this year, though it might just be an old one that nobody bothered to fix. So I should trust this?

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[CanadianMacFan]

OMG, a 300 baud modem. I remember using the 14.4k baud up to 56k modems and things were downloading slow. Yes, a 56k baud dial-up with compression would be enough to download PDF files but I wouldn't really want to do it. You must really be sadistic if you want people to do it on a 300 baud modem! One of my latest utility statements would have taken over two hours to download with that.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[Darinbob]

Paper works fine. Shows up in the mail, then I pile it with the others for my records. For online it's a hassle. Search down an obscure password and url, navigate through an unfamiliar site, etc.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[Mashiki]

The judge did not accept my printed copy, he thought it was too easily faked.

I'll bet the judge turns around and allows faxed documents as 100% reliable and can't be faked either. I don't know of a company these days that has an actual fax machine either. It's all done via software and when printed sent directly to the floor printer.

Re:Traditional banks are dead

[thegarbz]

The judge did not accept my printed copy, he thought it was too easily faked. He did accept my hard-copy mailed statement from the bank and I won my case. This was small claims court, the rules are different than in other courts.

I had the opposite experience. But that's beside the point. The evidence is available whenever required. Banks are legally required to keep all documentation related to the service they provide you. If I call up my bank and ask for a 30 year old bank statement, they need to provide it. That doesn't mean I want them to send it out to me every month, and even back when they did I kept it for my tax liability period only (5 years worth).

Implementation problem

[omnichad]

I don't need 15 secure places to login and get statements. The bank industry needs to get together to create a centralized secure statement repository where I can see it all. And maybe let my utilities pay to be delivered to this.

Or they could fix their statements so they're not printing full account numbers and use regular email - I don't care. It's not that much more risky than postal mail. For that matter, if I could click a link and then type just my username and password, that would be nice too. As it is now, you have to go to the bank's web site, log in, find the statements area, select the correct billing period, then choose a download format, and then finally download it.

Re:Implementation problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be happy with encrypted emails. So many of the security quandaries posed by encrypted email are either moot or already at least as bad in this case because the bank is already delivering the metadata not encrypted end-to-end (e.g. the title indicating a statement is ready for download, their name, your name). How hard would it really be for banks to setup encrypted email for those willing to setup S/MIME?

Re:Implementation problem

[gmack]

In Canada the postal company took care of it. It's called Epost and I can file everything there.

Re:Implementation problem

[radarskiy]

"For that matter, if I could click a link and then type just my username and password, that would be nice too."

Specifically, that would be nice for fishing your username and password.

Re: Implementation problem

[omnichad]

And how is that more of a risk than the typical link to the home page? Deep linking doesn't add to that.

Plus, I know how to read an address bar. There are so many better ways to do this that are still better than paper and also electronic. It's just not being done.

Re:Implementation problem

[hoggoth]

Oh for god's sake all they have to do is email a password protected PDF. Done. It would take one programmer an hour or two to implement.

Re:Implementation problem

[hoggoth]

If that's your concern, let me terrify you. It's easy to set up a website that has a similar URL to your bank but every page is a simple script that loads the corresponding page from the real bank and forwards it on to you. The millisecond I get your login info it transfers all your funds to my offshore account.

Whether you start at the home page or at the download page doesn't matter at all from a security perspective. You have to look at the URL.

Re:Implementation problem

[omnichad]

I'd take it.

Re:Implementation problem

[radarskiy]

I will thank you to note that I did not suggest that clicking on a link in the mail to just the home page is better than clicking on a deep link in the email. My point is that clicking any link in the email is the problem.

The email should have no links whatsoever, so that the user is forced to enter the correct domain in the browser themselves.

Re:Implementation problem

[hoggoth]

Ah true. So we're back to my original suggestion (elsewhere in these comments) that the vendor should email a password protected PDF and solve all of this in the easiest way.

Re:Implementation problem

[j-beda]

In Canada the postal company took care of it. It's called Epost and I can file everything there.

Canada Post's ePost is pretty good, and they do supply this type of service with a fairly large number of employers and utilities, but they don't have many banks and probably only about 20% of the bills that I regularly get.

Certainly I find it more convenient to go through my list of accounts every now and then and download and file all the PDFs, compared to dealing with paper statements mailed each month. As it is for the few paper statement we still get, I scan and then shred them. Having it all filed away on the computer makes it easier to find and deal with than the same documents on paper in the filing cabinet for almost every need I encounter.

Re:Implementation problem

[radarskiy]

Then we are also back to my response elsewhere in these comments that just like the receiver cannot trust the links in the mail, the bank cannot verify who they really sent the mail to. The only safe thing to send through the mail is a notification of an update and depend on out of channel information on how to get the update

Re:Implementation problem

[hoggoth]

No, that's why the PDF is password protected. Using a password the user sets up once in his or her preferences on the vendor's website.

Re:Implementation problem

[radarskiy]

The interceptor can now brute-force the password offline with no hope of any "N password failures so lock the account" policy kicking in. You can buy PDF password crackers commercially.

Personally

[Ol Olsoc]

I like both paper and digital copies. Both have advantages.

Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

For bank statements, or any other official correspondence, what I really need is a (a) complete, (b) permanent record that is (c) automatically and (d) reasonably securely moved to be (e) 100% under my control.

So far, the only way that happens is if they mail me paper copies. It is remarkable that we have yet to solve this apparently simple problem with a more technologically sophisticated alternative, but until we do, I will continue to opt out of getting statements [only] electronically.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[zm]

For bank statements, or any other official correspondence, what I really need is a (a) complete, (b) permanent record that is (c) automatically and (d) reasonably securely moved to be (e) 100% under my control.

So far, the only way that happens is if they mail me paper copies. It is remarkable that we have yet to solve this apparently simple problem with a more technologically sophisticated alternative, but until we do, I will continue to opt out of getting statements [only] electronically.

If only someone invented a device that can be used to make a hardcopy of a document that is available online, your problem would have been solved.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[ShanghaiBill]

So far, the only way that happens is if they mail me paper copies.

Or you could use a PRINTER to make a hardcopy only when you need it, which 99.9% of the time, is NEVER.

I have been paperless for years, and never, not once, have I needed a paper copy of a bank statement. When I refinanced my house, I just emailed the PDFs to the mortgage company.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So instead of having a copy already available to file, I should instead remember to go onto the web site of every service I use that provides statements, at the correct time each month, manually download that statement, and then save it somewhere completely safe and/or manually print it at my own expense?

I'm not seeing how your way is better.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But I don't just want "available online". That's the point. I also want automatically and reasonably securely delivered, so I always have a permanent copy of everything in the event of any dispute or audit.

When we have a system that gives me an effectively 100% safe electronic document vault, into which any service I use can push their statements, terms updates, etc. in some readily accessible and future-proof format, and over which they have no other control or influence, then we can talk.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

No, it isn't sufficient, because it still relies on me manually going to their web site and downloading every statement for every service I use at the correct time.

And if I'm going to print it anyway, then from my point of view all I've got is what I had before anyway, but now at my own expense and in a format that is more likely to be challenged as fabricated if I ever have to rely on it in the event of a serious dispute.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's an interesting idea, and possibly useful for other reasons if you trust them. (Mint itself isn't available where I am, as far as I know, but I can see the attraction.)

However, for important record-keeping and evidentiary purposes, using a third party is little better than trusting the original source. You still can't prove anything the third party says is authentic and original without at least an audit that is almost certainly not going to happen, and you still don't retain the permanent record under your own exclusive control, so if say the third party shuts down you've lost everything you thought you had.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[nukenerd]

Or you could use a PRINTER to make a hardcopy only when you need it, which 99.9% of the time, is NEVER.

Or you could get the BANK to use a printer to make a hardcopy and post it to you at their expense, so all you need is to pop it into the filing cabinet.

I often refer to past bank statements - only yesterday I needed to check what I paid by debit card for something I bought 11 months ago, for which I was claiming my money back under guarantee. Depending on your bank, but mine does not make it easy to see back past the current month and it is much faster to flick through paper copies anyway.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Darinbob]

I feel this way about online paychecks too. I never manage to dutifully go and check them out and save the entries (which aren't in nice printable form or even downloadable pdfs.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[rtb61]

To strip away the humour, every bit of data that is considered essential should be in hard copy because all it will do is take one major solar storm to completely fuck up the current system for quite some time, in fact months to fix up and get running again. Those stupid enough to not prepare for this will end up suffering enormously, starvation, break down of society and policing and collapsed infrastructure. Now this is not a matter of if but when and when could be tomorrow or decades from now. Every essential system should have a manual backup hard copy version and not doing this will make getting the digital system back up and running enormously difficult, lengthy and painful.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[ShanghaiBill]

I should instead remember to go onto the web site of every service I use that provides statements, at the correct time each month

My bank keeps statements online for two years. I download them annually, when I start working on my taxes.

manually download that statement

... which takes less time than opening an envelope and filing a paper in the right physical folder.

then save it somewhere completely safe and/or manually print it at my own expense?

An SSD automatically backed up by an encrypted offsite archive, such as Dropbox, is far safer than a paper copy.

I'm not seeing how your way is better.

You should talk to my dad. He thinks the web is fad, and it is just a matter of time till everyone realizes how silly it is and goes back to mailing paper letters written in cursive. I think the two of you would have a lot in common.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

My bank keeps statements online for two years. I download them annually, when I start working on my taxes.

You leave your bank in control of the only records of your account for up to a whole year? You're a lot braver than I am.

Then again, I'm guessing you also haven't been the victim of an administrative screw-up that left officials you were dealing with refusing to believe anything you said for a few months, even though their own version of what was happening could not possibly have been correct. That sort of incident will make you pretty conservative when it comes to trusting others with important records.

... which takes less time than opening an envelope and filing a paper in the right physical folder.

You must have much better on-line facilities than anything offered by any financial service I have ever used (about 4 major UK banks and a couple of other financial services in recent years, split between me personally and various business interests). In none of those cases could I get to downloading and storing away a PDF in less than a couple of minutes of hassle.

You should talk to my dad. He thinks the web is fad, and it is just a matter of time till everyone realizes how silly it is and goes back to mailing paper letters written in cursive. I think the two of you would have a lot in common.

That seems unlikely, but I don't accept that newer or higher tech is inherently better. In particular, I think a lot of current technologies are faster and more convenient in some ways, but also obviously worse in others such as reliability, longevity, security and/or privacy.

I bet your dad still spends quality time with his friends instead of keeping up with them through vacuous, emoji-laden updates of 140 characters or fewer, though. He probably owns his books and music collection, too. Not everything that is high-tech is better.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[thegarbz]

For bank statements, or any other official correspondence, what I really need is a (a) complete, (b) permanent record that is (c) automatically and (d) reasonably securely moved to be (e) 100% under my control.

Why?

No seriously in the last 20 years I've been asked for a bank statements a handful of times, when buying a house, and as court evidence. Both accepted copies of the electronic statements. Even if they didn't the bank is required to keep the records and present them when requested for a tiny fee.

It's just not as important of a document that you make it out to be.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Whibla]

To strip away the humour, every bit of data that is considered essential should be in hard copy because all it will do is take one major solar storm to completely fuck up the current system for quite some time, in fact months to fix up and get running again. Those stupid enough to not prepare for this ...

I think the preparation for that scenario is called a back-up, and 99.9% of large organisations, especially those dealing with your financials, have multiple modes of such.

In contrast, when talking about personally held paper statements and other important documents all it will take is one house sized fire to completely fuck up the system. As I think about it, if my house burned down I'm not entirely sure I'd even be able to remember which insurance company to contact about making a claim, and I'd certainly struggle to produce any policy documents at that stage, at least not without going online to download and print them.

Either way, the main reason institutions would like us to move towards paperless billing / statements is clearly overhead reduction, and the main reason some people object is inconvenience (personally I feel that that's more a perception of inconvenience - old habits and modes of thinking die hard - but I guess changing behaviour is actually an inconvenience, even if one that saves time / space / resources in the the long run).

Anyway, even considering the reported questionable behaviour of the companies involved, I'm not sure this would or should come as any surprise to anyone here. #notnewsatall

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I guess I just haven't been as lucky. I've had a few disputes over the years with organisations whose records were "not entirely accurate". In some cases the data had blatantly changed, and while I might be willing to believe it was due to an error in their systems and not deliberate corruption, either way they can't argue with original printed records sent to me at the time something actually happened. Sometimes a business has been known to forget that although it had updated its terms recently, the deal we had was much older and the terms we had were different.

For this reason, it's not just bank statements that I keep, but also statements from utility providers, changes in terms and conditions, and so on. Any records with a financial significance, anything legal/contractual with my signature under it, I keep a permanent copy under my control.

As I've mentioned in other posts, for me whether that is on paper or electronic isn't really the big issue. However, if it's going to be electronic then it still needs to be automatically collected, provably authentic, and future-proof. I look forward to the day when we have systems that satisfy those requirements reasonably well, but a simple on-paper version always has and works just as well today as it ever did.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[rpstrong]

You must have much better on-line facilities than anything offered by any financial service I have ever used (about 4 major UK banks and a couple of other financial services in recent years, split between me personally and various business interests). In none of those cases could I get to downloading and storing away a PDF in less than a couple of minutes of hassle.

Wow! Is this a UK thing? I've been banking online for longer than I can recall, also with a handful of different (US) banks - and, as I recall, all of them have featured easy to download documents. I just went to my current bank (BBVA Compass) to see how long it took. My login takes me to an account summary page. I click once on an account number which takes me to a details page which shows current activity. At the top of that page is a statements option. I click on a down arrow, then pick a statement date from the displayed list. (That's two pages and three clicks so far). Next I click on the 'Download' button (we're now up to four clicks, and we're still not finished) and then opt between Excel and PDF format - five clicks, if you're still counting. And I still have to press 'Enter' to save the file.

My other current bank takes about the same amount of time and effort, and so have other banks that I can recall from the past .

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm very jealous. That's about the level of effort this should need.

Depending on the institution, my version would involve things like a recently redesigned web site where I literally can't read some of the text or figure out which parts are clickable in their obviously broken layout, the most annoying PIN-based TFA device I've ever encountered, adjusting various redundant form controls in completely unnecessary ways, and tearing out approximately 5% of the total hairs on my head.

And that's just the banks. As far as I know, most of the utilities and other services we use don't offer the ability to download a complete, self-contained statement in electronic form anyway. Not even the banks provide electronic copies of all the other contractual paperwork; the notable exception who do are our business insurers, who invariably send complete policy wording and certificates to us all together in a single message when we renew each year.

Please keep in mind that as someone who works in small businesses, I have dozens of different accounts and cards to deal with in personal and professional capacities, so I am very interested in efficiency and getting things right first time here. None of those businesses have any dedicated admin staff, so whichever of us does the filing for any company paperwork isn't doing their real job at the same time. Messing around with downloading everything manually, we could easily wind up spending several hours every month dealing with this stuff. In contrast, filing every statement we get by post takes perhaps 5 minutes twice per month, including time to have a quick scan down everything to check for any obvious items of concern, and we typically get sent written copies of the various terms and so on by post so those need filing anyway.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[hoggoth]

A thousands times THIS.
Paperless statements should not mean I get an email once a month from all 20 vendors I use reminding me to go to their website, find my credentials and log on, poke around until I find their statement download page, then download a PDF and save it to my local hard drive. 20 vendors x 15 minutes each = 5 hours per month just to receive my statements.

Paperless statements should mean every month every vendor emails me a password protected PDF statement. Done. Or hell, if they can't be bothered to take that simple step, at least email me a link to a download so that I click the link, enter a username and password and the download starts immediately.

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[hoggoth]

Replying to myself...

I will even write the code for any company that wants to implement this!

Re:Speed is mostly irrelevant

[wyHunter]

Why should I pay to print it? ANY SAVINGS the bank makes in not sending me hard copy statements I am sure I will NOT see.

It's a circle of life kind of thing

[Krishnoid]

going paperless on multiple accounts will mean having that information scattered under different user names and passwords.

Which is then collected again under one username and password.

Re:It's a circle of life kind of thing

[Kazymyr]

Wasn't lastpass recently the victim of at least a successful breakin and several phishing campaigns? Yes, I will definitely trust it with all my accounts.

Re:It's a circle of life kind of thing

[CanadianMacFan]

Which is why I don't use an app that stores it all on a server. The program that I use is called Codebook though it used to be called STRIP. Been using it for a long time. It was on the Palm before the iPhone.

Worse issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Is entities (some of them governamental) requiring statements of 3rd party accounts (electrical, water, gas, bank, etc) for allowing things like residence address change.

And then, if you print yourself the statement from the pdf that those entities provide, they don't accept it.

Perhaps, if those entities, if they only provide electronic documents, they should be forced to have a way to validate such documents.

I believe PGP already did something like that for emails...

Re:Worse issue

[silas_moeckel]

I just renewed my license and the DMV specifically allowed printouts of electronic statements for the 2 required proof of address documents (for the idiotic federal ident bit).

No Problem At All

[Anonymous Coward]

I like both paper and digital copies. Both have advantages.

Exactly. I continue to require paper statements be mailed to me. I refuse to allow ANY communication via email. But, I happily use the online services including check images and statements when i choose to.

The very moment that anyone even implies that paper is old, useless, wasteful, for the less educated(really?), lower income... I immediately label them inexperienced and clueless morons. That they think that their smartphone is secure or the only window to the rest of the world shows them for what they are. Idiot kids, that will whine like babies when their system collapses.

Re: No Problem At All

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

And yet for most areas like this, the opposite will be true in practice.

No-one has ever broken into my home or office and stolen our entire filing system in seconds while we weren't looking.

No-one has ever remotely accessed the box file on the shelf next to me and rewritten the statement showing questionable transactions that we're currently disputing.

Re: No Problem At All

[Ol Olsoc]

on a stochastic level your smartphone is magnitudes more secure than any paper-based communication.

But on a practical level, no. I've never had the contents of my filing cabinets locked, the key changed, and then been told I have to send bitcoin to get the new key. Just think of the paper copy as a backup in the "solid ground" the radical old school backup system.

Re: No Problem At All

[Ol Olsoc]

Put it back in the commode, man! Or at least wear nitrile gloves and a good respirator.

Re: No Problem At All

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I doubt that.

Re: No Problem At All

[Darinbob]

Until you drop it in the toilet and all that data is gone.

Re: No Problem At All

[thegarbz]

And yet for most areas like this, the opposite will be true in practice.

No-one has ever broken into my home or office and stolen our entire filing system in seconds while we weren't looking.
No-one has ever remotely accessed the box file on the shelf next to me and rewritten the statement showing questionable transactions that we're currently disputing.

Hardly. You're assuming that the filing system is kept on the phone. It's not, it's kept in the bank. Even in practice people's houses get robbed far more often than the digital archives of a bank. And on the reliability side people's houses burn down far more often than the bank's archives too.

Re: No Problem At All

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

The point is, I don't trust the other party to keep the records reliably and act only in accordance with the true situation. Perhaps you're thinking I'm crazy and paranoid, but my stance on this one is born of bitter experience. Here are a few of the organisations that actually have told me untrue things (in several cases, clearly impossible things) as a result of their own records being incorrect, causing significant harm to me or one of my businesses.

My government's tax authority

Multiple banks

A credit card provider

Multiple utility companies

Multiple software developers (in relation to licensing/registration)

In each case, the fastest way to get things fixed was to present our own robust evidence of the true situation. In a small number of cases we even took the first step towards formal legal proceedings based on that evidence. It's amazing how often someone on the other side seems to realise what is happening at that point and suddenly be able to see our point of view and fix the problem.

I do understand that in some of these cases I've probably been very unlucky. It's hard to know for sure what happened, because often the organisations that made a mistake will eventually try to fix the problem without ever giving any sort of explanation or any other statement that might admit wrong-doing or liability. In some of these cases, no-one I know personally has ever mentioned having similar problems to me (though in other cases they have, so I'm not that much of an outlier). But that doesn't really matter; these things have probably wasted several weeks of my life over the years, and my strict record-keeping has been what eventually got things straightened out, so I have no interest in giving that up for anything that isn't at least as useful just because it involves technology.

Re: No Problem At All

[thegarbz]

In each case, the fastest way to get things fixed was to present our own robust evidence of the true situation.

Did you ever uncover any act of a falsified record? Just because some people are idiots doesn't mean that their bank records are being kept incorrectly. That's kind of the point. I have many times used someone's own records against them. That's called dealing with underpaid service drones. It does not follow that because you're dealing with an idiot that they'd be criminally falsifying records.

Re: No Problem At All

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

"Falsified" seems to imply a measure of malicious intent. In the cases I'm thinking of, I'm willing to trust that the problems were straightforward screw-ups. Most of them could plausibly have been a combination of a simple data entry error and a lack of adequate safeguards to detect inconsistent data or impossible situations automatically.

But again, this doesn't really matter; the fact is that their data was wrong at the time of the problem, and my businesses and I suffered damage as a result. Having incontrovertible records of my own, independent of what the other party's records said by the time the problem was discovered, has generally been the most reliable and efficient way to get someone to realise the error and make good the damage. And often, evidence they supplied themselves prior to whatever incident caused the corruption is the most convincing of all from their point of view.

In my experience, once you can get a real person with the ability to fix the problem to look at the place where the problem occurred and say "Hang on, that can't be right", you're usually 90% of the way to getting everything sorted out. It's breaking through whatever processes and barriers are in the way that tends to take a lot of time, because almost invariably those processes and barriers will be designed without considering the possibility that their own systems might not be working properly.

Re: No Problem At All

[thegarbz]

Most of them could plausibly have been a combination of a simple data entry error and a lack of adequate safeguards to detect inconsistent data or impossible situations automatically.

I'm not sure about what electronic records you get sent, but every bank, utility or ISP I've dealt with has sent me (and in the case of banks, keeps on file) PDFs of what they send out electronically. I.e. if data entry is your problem with electronic invoices then it's unlikely that there's a difference.

But it's actually quite funny because while I'm well on the side of electronic invoices and records and I've used them in a variety of scenarios, I still get paper statements from the bank. Simple reason is that it's the frigging banks themselves who request paper copies as evidence when you get a homeloan with them. When I last refinanced (6 months ago) I did so through a broker and with the bank I get my paycheck paid into. They STILL requested evidence in paper form.

Re: No Problem At All

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I wish all the institutions I have to deal with worked as sensibly with electronic versions as the ones that you and some of the other posters here seem to work with. Maybe UK service companies are just lagging behind in this respect.

They still wouldn't meet all of my criteria even if they caught up, but at least you'd have some chance of staying on top of all the manual downloads if they operated more practical systems such as some of you are describing.

Support your legacy postal service

[rmdingler]

The mail that rhymes with a mollusc has been beaten up in the modern age by facsimile, email, text, and all manner of twitter;

But, there are still useful applications for the slower delivery of tangible paper reproductions, including many legal documents and even holiday cards.

You may have also noticed that when people are free to speak quickly and repeatedly without careful thought, much of what escapes into the electronic noise is tripe.

Re:Support your legacy postal service

[freeze128]

A clam is a mollusk. Do you mean spam?

Re:Support your legacy postal service

[rmdingler]

I have to tell you, I didn't think anyone would get that.

Re:Support your legacy postal service

[drinkypoo]

I don't want the USPS to stay around, I want digital signatures to be taken seriously. The USPS is primarily a spam-delivery outfit; the remaining work they do is delivering small packages for the other carriers, which is part of a wacky deal.

Re:Support your legacy postal service

[nbauman]

I think he means "snail."

And I think he's either British or an English graduate student.

Re:Support your legacy postal service

[rmdingler]

I think he means "snail."

He thinks you're correct, but the clam joke was better.

And I think he's either British or an English graduate student.

Aw. That is the single nicest thing I've ever been called on /. Is this a trick?

Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[Irate Engineer]

The push to paperless statements has nothing to do about the customer's desires, or the "going green" hogwash they advertise on the envelopes. The companies are pushing for paperless because paying people to print them out, stuff them envelopes, and then paying postage for 100k's of customers every month is an regular expense that eats into their bottom lines. Automatically pushing out a pdf by email, or posting it on a server, costs pennies and doesn't require nearly as many employees to accomplish.

This push is analogous to the self-scan checkouts at the supermarket. They're just trying to get rid of staff and get you to provide the service yourself.

I will always get paper statements from Comcast and I will always pay the monthly bill with a nice paper check because that is the only way I can screw with the bastards.

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[penguinoid]

Stupid efficiency, saving money and resources. I'll show them!

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[Razed By TV]

Automatically pushing out a pdf by email, or posting it on a server, costs pennies and doesn't require nearly as many employees to accomplish.

A large part of the issue for me is that the electronic copy they provide is vastly inferior. The companies I deal with make it convoluted to download statements from their website. They use non-standard formats. They have buggy interfaces that don't function in Firefox. It is difficult to download multiple statements at once. And they rarely offer statements older than 12 months. That print statement will still be file away 18 months from now if I have some sort of computer failure, but may be difficult to replace if I only have an electronic copy. (I know, backups...)

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[Archfeld]

If it is not saving ME money then why would I put myself out one iota for the vendor. If I go paperless it had better include a discount on the service and access to a limited number of free paper copies in case I need it for some other reason.

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[whoever57]

This.

I agree with you entirely. Although my bank claims to make statements available for 7 years, immediately after one of my credit cards was suspended due to fraud, I wasn't able to log in and see any transactions. Paper copies don't have this problem.

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[Kjella]

They're just trying to get rid of staff and get you to provide the service yourself.

I guess it depends on whether you think the service person is actually adding value to the process. I hated the bank tellers of old, it was an office I had to get to in their limited opening hours with a line I'd have to stand in to get to a person who'd mostly just do exactly what I just told him to do like deposit money, withdraw money, pay the bills and whatnot. I switch to an online-only bank in 2000 and never looked back, suddenly I had 24x7 service from anywhere at better prices. And where other banks had trouble and went down and said use the traditional bank, I knew that in my bank all the red lights and alarms would go off to get it back online. And they did, very quickly, every time. Just make sure you have a little cash to bridge you over, but then that's a good idea anyway.

In other cases, yes it's really the service getting cut like a restaurant going from fresh food cooked from the ground up to frozen pre-fabs and half-processed foods they just mix and warm up. Like if you actually get knowledgeable help at the store and not just a sales droid trying to upsell you or push high margin items like extended warranties or clueless staff that barely know how to use the registers, much less know anything about the products they sell. It might be a revenue adding service, but it certainly doesn't feel like a value adding service. So I very much like self service because I usually get what I want, unless there's a particular skill or reason it's much better you do it than I.

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[tompaulco]

Yes, and they don't really save THAT much money compared to how much money in time hassle and opportunity cost that it costs the customer. They don't actually have staff print that stuff out and stuff envelopes. That is all done by machine. The postage for presort is much less than the price of a stamp. in truth, a large bank may save a few hundred thousand a year by going paperless. Their customers, however, will have expenses in the millions for their own hassle, record retention, paper costs, printing (if desired), etc.

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[tompaulco]

This.

I agree with you entirely. Although my bank claims to make statements available for 7 years, immediately after one of my credit cards was suspended due to fraud, I wasn't able to log in and see any transactions. Paper copies don't have this problem.

Yes, and if you are a victim of identity theft, your paper statements will be your salvation. You will be unable to prove who you are and thus unable to access any of your online accounts.

Re:Not Advantage, it's Labor and Postage Costs!

[nbauman]

Oh great. Once you have a problem and need access to your records, your access to your records disappears.

Which is like saying all your records disappear.

PDF?

[jwymanm]

Aren't all these issues solved by the websites that offer statements as simple PDFs? Yes it is silly with today's age of 8tb+ drives that they don't store all history (considering every customer could have all their history stored on a single frigging drive). I think that latter part is a money grab since they do offer back statements at request for $$. I hate paper statements and find that the problem is the other way around - that I get actual envelopes sometimes even though I opted in to digital that simply have a summary or say "opted in to digital." Maybe the other problem is that not all providers offer the pdf option or make it difficult to get to and that people are just plain lazy if it isn't done for them. That I can agree with but it is likely those are the same people that just threw away the last X statements into the trash anyway.

Email it to me...

[gQuigs]

I really don't care if it's not completely private that I pay comcast $72 a month.

Just don't provide any links to pay it in the email, so you don't get people even more prepared to be phished.. People can manaully go to comcast.net or use their bank's bill pay system.

 

According to TFS One Size Does Not Fit All

[retroworks]

Eureka, retired people without a computer prefer direct mail, and young people who travel and change domiciles prefer PDF. Surely there is a Nobel Prize waiting somewhere.

Re:According to TFS One Size Does Not Fit All

[nospam007]

"Eureka, retired people without a computer prefer direct mail, and young people who travel and change domiciles prefer PDF. Surely there is a Nobel Prize waiting somewhere."

What did you expect from HughPickens, he posts just to attract people to his site.

More than bills

[tgibson]

I print out all of my emails, index them, and file them away. Except the spam of course. Wadded up and straight into the trash can with those.

Banks just don't get it.

[whoever57]

For years, one of my banks wanted me to go paperless, while not offering anything similar to statements. I could only view transactions on a page (a page that did not print properly).

Then, the bank stated offering PDF downloads. However, when my credit card was suspended due to fraud, I could no longer log in and view that account.

Recently, when preparing for taxes, I downloaded the PDF statements. But getting to each statement took far too many clicks.

What is so hard to understand about the idea that I want 100% reliable and easy access to statements that look like paper statements?

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[drinkypoo]

If your bank doesn't offer to simply email you the statement, which should not contain sufficient information to impersonate you to the bank anyway, then they are failing.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[Solandri]

What was really fun was when I needed a statement from 3 years back that I had lost in a move to resolve a dispute with a creditor who claimed I hadn't paid a bill. No problem, my bank keeps all those online, or so I thought. I logged in, found the statement, clicked to download the PDF and... "This statement is not currently available. Please wait up to 2 weeks while we retrieve it from our records." WTF? 1TB HDDs were $100 (at the time), and they're archiving records onto tape after just 2 years?

Since then, I download PDFs of all my bank statements at the end of the year, sort them, and store them on my own file server. I don't trust the banks to keep them, much less find them. I hear you about it taking too many clicks though. You'd think they'd have a "download all of this year's statements with one click!" button.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[DogDude]

"too many clicks"? That sounds like a personal problem.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[fhage]

When opening any account that may generate taxable income, I always ask; "Will you send me a summary tax statement at the end of each year?"

Lately, the reply is "Yes! After you register and create an account, just log in and then swipe right on the PersonalServices emoji floating on your landing wall, pin "MyDocuments" to the Selector area, zoom out, scroll down, and long tap the individual statement in the list. You'll get a Special Offers flyer while you wait for your statement to be 'retrieved'. After it's done, the down arrow shaped cloud in the bottom right corner will turn gold so you can swipe it. Be sure to get our free app in the play store which provides you an EyeView and can squirt the doc to your tax app. If you still want to use a PC, click on the steam punk binocular icon, located on the PS wall to bring up the MyTeller IE plugin ..."

Me:That's nice, but I'd prefer we exchange public keys so you can send me signed statements in PDF form via email, that only I can open. I have several popular forms of U2F keys as well as my public key files on a USB stick.

Them: "We can't do that because email is not safe. That's how computers get infected."

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[CanadianMacFan]

Maybe they think you will download your statement when you go to check it each month to make sure that it's correct. I don't know what it is where you are but I only have 30 days to report any errors or else they assume it's correct. And since I've caught a couple of errors (over 25 years mind you) I make sure that I check my statements, especially for the bank and credit cards.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[nbauman]

My mother was a bookkeeper.

She said she never caught the banks in a mistake until the computers came in.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[CanadianMacFan]

That's quite possible.

But before computers came in a lot of the transactions were done in person so you would catch any errors right away before they would make it into the system. For example if a teller made an error on a slip you would verify it before signing it. Or if you made an error the teller would verify it before entering it. Now it goes into the system and it can gets a correction if caught or else you have to check your statement.

The other thing is that products are much more complex than they were even 20 years ago as financial institutions try to differentiate from one another so there is more opportunities for things to go wrong. That's just on the customer front. I'd hate to think what the regulatory side makes their systems look like.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[nbauman]

Yes, and before computers, accountants had clever systems in place (since 14th century Italy) to catch mistakes. That's why they use double entry.

Here's an example of how a doctor (and hospital pharmacist, and nurse) made a mistake on a computer that almost killed somebody, which they almost certainly wouldn't have made before computers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03...

At my own hospital, in 2013 we gave a teenager a 39-fold overdose of a common antibiotic. The initial glitch was innocent enough: A doctor failed to recognize that a screen was set on "milligrams per kilogram" rather than just "milligrams." But the jaw-dropping part of the error involved alerts that were ignored by both physician and pharmacist. The error caused a grand mal seizure that sent the boy to the I.C.U. and nearly killed him.

How could they do such a thing? It's because providers receive tens of thousands of such alerts each month, a vast majority of them false alarms. In one month, the electronic monitors in our five intensive care units, which track things like heart rate and oxygen level, produced more than 2.5 million alerts. It's little wonder that health care providers have grown numb to them.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[CanadianMacFan]

The financial system still uses double entry accounting. Just because you don't see it on your statement doesn't mean it isn't happening on the back-end.

Re:Banks just don't get it.

[nbauman]

I know. I set up my own double-entry bookkeeping system by reading an accounting book and writing a set of spreadsheets. Started with Lotus, ported to Excel.

It was a book on corporate accounting. It might have been overkill to follow the instructions to get a system designed for a Fortune 500 company, but it was educational.

Obvious Captain

[jargonburn]

This just is: not everything is great for everybody!
News at eleven.

Re:Paperless statements should be easier

[srichard25]

Exactly. I would be much more willing to adopt paperless statements if companies made them more convenient than paper statements.

My bank only gives me 6 months of history. 6 months!!! I can't even look back over the entire year to do an annual budget or research something older at tax prep time. As cheap as digital storage is, banks should be providing at least 5 years of history.

i post on Slashdot and paperless still isn't good

[wheeda]

If you refi, then need a statement from the old lender, you get screwed. I don't risk it. I just make them mail all those damn statements to me.

I want to control my statements

[rthille]

So I want a local copy, not trusting the company to provide access when (possibly years later, or after I terminate my account), but I'm not a web developer so coding up a script to log into each of my accounts and authenticate via whatever wacky scheme they've come up with this month to try to make it harder to phish their customers, and then find any new statements and download them automatically.

Turns out there's a perfect solution to this: email. If it's good enough for a password reset, it should be good enough for a statement. Of course it should be signed electronically by the company such that I (or a court) can easily validate it, and encrypted for me based on the public key I attached to my account. The encryption of the emails (both signing and actual encryption) would be somewhat computationally expensive, but nothing like the paper and stamp.

Re:I want to control my statements

[drinkypoo]

It doesn't really matter that much if the statement is signed; you can always just log into online banking and retrieve the statement manually if you suspect its contents. Not that I'm against a crypto signature...

Re:I want to control my statements

[rthille]

The signature would be to prevent malicious revision by the company after the fact. "That deposit you say you made? We never received it." Very unlikely, true, but easy to protect against for a small cost.

non-issue...

[MrWin2kMan]

Why would I want paper statements? Paper fades, gets wet, gets lost, takes up space, is inconvenient when you move, catches fire, has to be shredded... In contrast, eStatements are portable, save trees, and with cloud services, are virtually always redundantly backed up and available remotely wherever you happen to be. I've been using electronic banking for well over fifteen years, and I enjoy the convenience and safety of downloading my statements when I can get to them. You just have to keep in mind the billers online storage limits.

What about email?

[bluegutang]

For me, the main problem with paperless statements is that they don't email you the statement - they require you to login to some website (with a name/password you might not remember), then navigate around the site until you find the statement, then download it. That's a real pain. I would much prefer to see a new email in my inbox, click on it to read it, then press "Archive" and be able to search for it (by company name) whenever I wanted in the future.

I understand the reasons for this - email has historically been insecure. But nowadays major email providers like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all use STARTTLS. So there should be no obstacle to sending statements and notices by email to most people's addresses.

Re:What about email?

[radarskiy]

STARTTLS only prevents the case where a 3rd party grabs the data in transit. It does nothing to ensure that it was sent it to the right place. The post has mechanisms that at least theoretically will forward physical mail when you move, but if someone has to change email providers there is no equivalent.

It's harder than you think

[rsilvergun]

"Easy Access" means you want 5-7 years of documents. You probably also want to be able to Generate them on the fly. Now, multiply that by millions and millions of customers and add the fact that just about everybody wants them on the same day (with a huge spike in April for the US) and you've got a huge headache on your hands. Then add the complexity of generated corrected statements and multiple accounts and the real fun begins.

Re:It's harder than you think

[whoever57]

Now, multiply that by millions and millions of customers and add the fact that just about everybody wants them on the same day (with a huge spike in April for the US) and you've got a huge headache on your hands.

1. Disk space is cheap. They could be created and stored
2. Even with the infrastructure needed to generate on the fly, the cost will be less than stuffing and mailing envelopes. Excessive greed at the banks when trying to save costs is probably costing them money. Don't try to save so much per customer and more customers will sign up. It's a win/win situation.

I switched a brokerage account to paperless

[QuietLagoon]

Then, after a few years, I closed the account. After the account was closed, I lost access to all of the account statements that were online, and I had no paper versions. Fortunately, the broker was able to recover the statements and send me paper copies. But it was a hassle.

.
Now I download the pdf statement for my important accounts each month and store them in my archive.

Re:I switched a brokerage account to paperless

[dingleberrie]

This!

This past weekend I tried to access statements from two different accounts at Chase. I logged in and saw some of my remaining accounts, but the ones I wanted were closed. The balances had been at zero for a few months and there was no online way to get any statements or even 2015 tax forms for them. It was as though they had never existed.

Taught me a lesson. I will continue to get paper statements.

It would also be nice if there were a program that you could automate login and retrieval of all your monthly account PDFs (like Mint.com, but for PDF copies).
Somebody start that website and let me participate for a cut.

Paperless for years, but I print every statement

[Applehu Akbar]

I do all my banking and brokerage online, but I print statements first so I can reconcile, and then file them in case the IRS ever needs to see it.

Re:"in particuar particular"

[93 Escort Wagon]

LOL. Americans...

Assuming your intent was to demonstrate the superiority of your own (presumably non-American) English language skills... using "LOL" was not a particularly wise choice.

also for driving docs

[kencurry]

I switched to Geico recently, and I do love their phone app. But the last few times I've needed to show my insurance card, the f**ing app wanted to force an update right then and there - so I couldn't get to the proof of insurance without a lot of dicking around. So, I went back to printing out the damn thing and keeping it in the glove box.

Emails Get Lost

[kackle]

I used have an AT & T MasterCard credit card. After they offered the paperless option, I signed up figuring it would save the trees, etc.

It worked fine; then one month, I never got the "your bill is due" email, despite the lady on the phone saying they sent it thrice. I missed the payment due date, so there was a late charge and a finance charge added to my account, neither of which I had ever earned before as I pay my balance off monthly. She was nice enough to reverse the late fee, but enforced the other. I've gone back to the paper versions ever since.

Re:Emails Get Lost

[CanadianMacFan]

And you've never had a piece of snail mail go missing? The post office isn't 100% reliable either so there isn't a guarantee that you are going to get the statement that way either. Very probably you will.

If you always pay off your bill in full why not set it up to do so automatically? Or just set a reminder to go off to check in case you hadn't got your statement. A good idea even if you are getting a paper statement.

I've been "crammed" several times

[tompaulco]

I've had several accounts "cram" me into electronic statements by sneaking some wording in somewhere that if you look at a statement online or something that you are automatically enrolled in electronic statements. American Express did it to me, Best Buy did it to me. Then the problem is that they don't bother to send you statement reminders in email either, so at some point you just start getting calls from them asking why you haven't sent a payment and start racking up huge late fees.
Even if they did send a statement, which they didn't, I checked spam and everything, it is not just the technically clueless who get the shaft, it is the technically competent as well. I get dozens of e-mails a day. If I get an email from a credit card, unless I am at that very moment prepared to deal with it and pay it, it is just going to get put on the back burner and ultimately forgotten. My paper bills sit in a pile on my desk, in date order and get dealt with.
Also, paper statements are not available online forever. If the government comes after you, they can demand paperwork for in some cases 7 years, and in some cases, from the beginning of time. It is up to you to have that information available, and if you depend on your third parties to keep that for you, you are SOL. Basically you need to save a local copy electronically, or print it out and store. So they are outsourcing their cost of doing business to you without providing you a nice discount for performing their job for them.
As far as banks go, I go to my bank about 3 to 4 times per week. Most of those are for deposits. Yes, my bank has a mobile deposit app. Yes, like most banks, they charge a convenience fee for something which is a convenience for them and an inconvenience for you. The tellers are still free, so I make my deposits in person at the bank, where the tellers all know me and personally greet me by name.

If you can organize paper, you can organize e-stat

[Tony Isaac]

Organizing paper statements requires having a system, some kind of stack of folders, that allow you to find statements you want to find. If you can do that, you can also organize e-statements using folders on your hard drive. If you can't do that, your paper statements are probably a mess too.

DON'T just trust the statement provider to keep them, download each statement each month as PDF and save it on your own hard drive. AND make sure you have backups! Statements aren't any good unless you hang on to them, whether they are e-statements or paper.

Re:Print/Save Them?

[tompaulco]

Why not just print and/or save the file locally?

Good idea. Since they are saving the postage and printing, you can just print it locally and they can reimburse you for it. of course, a million people printing or saving locally is a lot more expensive than sending out statements in mass from a central location.

Re:Paperless statements should be easier

[CanadianMacFan]

My bank gives you 30 days to dispute a charge so if you aren't looking at them on a regular basis then you miss your chance to fix a problem. It doesn't happen often but in 25 years I have found a couple. So if you wait to go over your statements only once a year then you can be losing money. Same thing for credit cards.

Every weekend I set aside 15 or 30 minutes to update my finances. It's this much because I keep track of everything I spend down to the cent. If you don't want to be as thorough then it would just take five minutes once a week to look through your email for any new statements and download the PDFs. Give them a quick look to make sure that everything looks good and file them on your computer. Then they are there for when you want them later on.

Citibank stopped supporting Linux

[nbauman]

I stopped using Citibank online when they stopped supporting Linux a couple of years ago.

I decided that logging in with Linux (Knoppix) was more secure at that time than Windows.

Citibank had a pretty good online system. (Not perfect, but if you were committed to digital, as I am, and you were willing to read the instructions carefully, do some trial and error, work with them, and call up their tech support number occasionally, it worked well.)

I also decided that I had to use paper and digital in parallel, until I was convinced that the digital was working well and doing everything that paper did. (It's stupid to quit the old system before the new system is working well, right?)

I kept getting paper statements, but I could download PDFs of my bank statements every year, which was convenient for a few forms I had to file with my bank statements, or to get checking and credit card account activity to import into spreadsheets.

Then one day I couldn't log in any more. At tech support, I first spoke to an asshole who tried to blame me and my computer for not connecting properly. Second try I got to a guy who understood what was going on and told me they had stopped supporting Linux. Win/Mac only.

Imagine working all night to file tax forms or some other financial documents by a deadline, and then find out at 2am that you suddenly can't log in any more.

Since then, I logged on in Windows a few times, but it was more trouble than it was worth. I could scan my printed statements, after all. And when I want real security, I go to the teller machine in the branch on the corner, where I have to go anyway to get cash.

I'm really surprised that Citibank, which made such a commitment to online banking, doesn't support Linux. (If anybody knows otherwise, let me know.) They must support Android phones, don't they?

This raises another problem with online banking. What if you're using a system that they suddenly stop supporting?

Anyway, when you've got your act together, Citibank, let me know.

Re:Citibank stopped supporting Linux

[nbauman]

Thanks, I'll try again.

Do you trust your ISP?

[therealbev]

I obey Murphy's Law religiously. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that as soon as I need to lay my hands on a particular statement for some critical reason my ISP will go down for 24 hours due to the need to repair something somewhere. While the paper might be hard to find, I can probably find it sooner than my ISP can fix whatever problem it has. Same reason I don't get e-bills.