Why don't banks give access to all your transaction activity?
"Things are the way they are because they got that way.   - Gerald Weinberg Banks have been in business for a very long time. Yet, much of what we take for granted in terms of technology (capabilities, capacity, and cost) are relatively recent developments. Banks are often stuck on older platforms (mainframe, for instance) where the cost of redundant online storage far exceeds the commodity price consumers take for granted. Similarly, software enhancements that require back-end changes can be more complicated. Moreover, unless there's a buck (or billion) to be made, banks just tend to move slowly compared to the rest of the business world. Overcoming ""but we've always done it that way"" is an incredible hurdle in a large, established organization like a bank — and so things don't generally improve without great effort. I've had friends who've worked inside technology divisions at big banks tell me as much. A smaller bank with less historical technical debt and organizational overhead might be more likely to fix a problem like this, but I doubt the biggest banks lose any sleep over it." "All the other answers here are correct, but I'll add one more perspective. I am a business architect at one of the world's largest retail banks. Every day I experience the frustration of trying to get large-scale corporate IT to do anything, so I feel that your question is just one facet of the wider question: ""why are banks so old and busted?"" While it's true that the cost of online, redundant, performant, secure data storage is significantly higher than you anticipate in the question, it should still be well within the capacity of a large enterprise. The true cost is the cost of change. Nothing at a bank is a green field development. Everything is a bolt-on to existing systems. Any change brings the risk that existing functionality will be affected, therefore vast schemes of regression testing (largely manually executed) spring up around even the most trivial developments. Costs scale exponentially with the number of platforms affected (often utterly distinct, decades-old, incompatible platforms that have arisen out of historical mergers and acquisitions). Only statutory, revenue-generating and critical maintenance change is approved. Any form of cost-cutting that increases risk is quickly extinguished. This is because when things go wrong, IT get blamed by their business colleagues. This is because the business colleagues in turn get blamed by the regulators, the media, the customers, and the public at large. Who doesn't cuss their bank when the ATM is unavailable? The bank's IT organization develops a kind of management sclerosis, risk averse in the extreme. Banks can't ship a beta version and patch it later. This ultra-low-innovation approach is a direct result of market and regulatory forces. If you were happy with a bank account that played fast and loose with your money the way Facebook plays with your data, then banking would be much cheaper, much more innovative, and much riskier. To get back to your specific question, some banks actually do offer a much longer back catalog of transactions for download (usually only a few key fields of each transaction though), and the ones that don't most likely don't see it as a revenue generating selling point, and it therefore falls above their innovation appetite." "I would say a lot of the answers here aren't quite right. The main issue here is that banking is a highly oligopolous industry - there are few key players (the UK, for example, has only 5 major banks operating under a variety of brands: it's all the same companies underneath) and the market is very, very hard to enter owing to the immense regulatory burden. Because the landscape is so narrow and it's possible to keep close tabs on all  your competitors, there's no incentive to spend money on shiny new things to keep up with the competition - the industry is purely reactive.  If nobody else has an awesome, feature-filled online portal, there's no need for any one bank to make one.  If everybody is reactive, and nobody proactive, then it's a short logical deduction that improvements happen at a glacial pace. Also take into account that when you've got this toxic ""bare-minimum"" form of competition, the question for these people soon turns to ""what can we get away with?"" which results in things like subpar online portals with as much information as you like delivered on paper for a hefty charge, and extortionate, price fixed administrative fees.  Furthermore your transaction history is super valuable information.  There are one or two highly profitable companies who collate international transaction data and whose sole job in life is to restrict access to that information to the highest bidders.  Your transaction history is an asset in a multibillion dollar per year industry, and as such it is not surprising that banks don't want to give it out for free." One reason why they limit it is to protect you. If I hack your account, I get your entire financial history. I can see a copy of every check you ever wrote. I can see the account number with every doctor, utility, and credit card. I can also see the account information on the back of those checks for all your relatives who you sent $10 for their birthday.  I can use the information in those accounts to see where you used to live, this allows me to spoof you when applying for new credit. If they ask if I ever lived on Main street in Anytown USA. I can confidently say yes. If I only let you download a window of time, the responsibility is on you to protect that data that is before the window. They protect it in file isolated from the internet, and finally only in archive locations. Some of the information doesn't exists in electronic form. Data from the 1990's and earlier may not exist in the form you want. They have been expanding the windows over time. I can see/download a pdf of my monthly statement going back 7 years. Of course that data can't go directly into quicken. Some places do let you get a file that goes back farther, but they charge you for it, and it can only be done by them sending you the file. That prevents you from downloading your entire  history everyday. That times 70 Million customers would overwhelm their server and other infrastructure. Regarding the amount of data: Although if you count only your data, it would be quite less 10 MB, multiply this by 1 million customers and you can see how quickly the data grows. Banks do retain data for longer period, as governed by country laws, typically in the range of 7 to 10 years.  The online data storage cost is quite high 5 to 10 times more than offline storage. There are other aspects, Disaster recover time, the more the data the more the time. Hence after a period of time Banks move the data into Archive that are cheaper to store but are not available to online query, plus the storage is not optimized for search. Hence retrieval of this data often takes few days if the regulator demands or court or any other genuine request for data retrieval. To add technical detail to other answers, your (and some commenters') estimates of storing that data is woefully (many orders of magnitude) off. Let's take your 10MB of transaction data per user. You're only estimating text records like in Quicken. Now add on the volume of storing everye check's image. That's 100K (if not 500Kb depending on resolution of the scan) per check. If you have 100 checks per year (not unrealistic, if you pay all utility/morgage bills by check, as well as purchases), you now have 10Mb/year to 50MB/year. Now you're asking for 10 years of this, so you have 100-500MB per customer. NOT 10MB-70MB as you initially assumed. Let's take a mid-range figure, 300 MB. You were estimating using consumer grate cheap-o storage (which Facebook can afford for their data, as they don't store transaction data). Now let's up that to enterprise server hard drives. Your storage costs just rose 2x-5x. Now, typically you'd have RAID. So 2x more. Most large financial institutions have multiple data centers. You typically store all data's copies in those data centers for DR purposes. Your multiplier added another 2x-4x Most production data servers have multiple copies (Write DB server + one or more read-only copies). Multiply by 2x-4x With some rare exceptions, most banks don't just have one central database server. Each major app  / business line would have its own DB, so you multiply that by 2x-20x depending on the bank, especially if it's arrived at its size by merging with other banks and has dozens of inherited legacy systems. multiple backups. Regulatory backup requirements means you don't just back up your data once a year. You do it daily, till the data is purged from DB. Meaning, you don't store ONE copy of your transaction in backup. You stored, say, 10*365 copies, assuming 10 year retention) So, at the low end, your cost estimates are 30*2*2*2*2*2 = 900 times off (3 orders of magnitude) just for live database storage, and 3500 times off for backup costs. At the high end, they could be 50*5*2*4*4*20=16,000 times off (4-5 orders of magnitude) At this range, no, it isn't worth it for the bank to keep your transactions available in DB and online any longer than bare-bones absolutely critically necessary. Many good points have been brought up, and I'll just link to them here, for ease. Source: I work at a credit/debit card transaction processing company on the Database and Processing Software teams. See mhoran_psprep's answer. See Chris' answer. Believe it or not, banks don't expose their primary (or secondary) database to end users. They don't expose their fastest / most robust database to end users. By only storing x days of data in that customer-facing database and limiting the range of any one query, any query run against it is much less likely to cause system-wide slowness. They most definitely have database archives which are kept offline, and most definitely have an employee-facing database which allows employees to query larger ranges of data. What would a bank have to gain by allowing you to query a full year of transactions? A big issue for historical data in banking is that they don't/can't reside within a single system. Archives of typical bank will include dozen(s) of different archives made by different companies on different, incompatible systems. For example, see http://www.motherjones.com/files/images/big-bank-theory-chart-large.jpg as an illustration of bank mergers and acquisitions, and AFAIK that doesn't include many smaller deals. For any given account, it's 10-year history might be on some different system. Often, when integrating such systems, a compromise is made - if bank A acquires bank B that has earlier acquired bank C, then if the acquisition of C was a few years ago, then you can skip integrating the archives of C in your online systems, keep them separate, and use them only when/if needed (and minimize that need by hefty fees).  Since the price list and services are supposed to be equal for everyone, then no matter how your accounts originated, if 10% of archives are an expensive enough problem to integrate, then it makes financial sense to restrict access to 100% of archives older than some arbitrary threshold. Well, I know why the Rabobank in the Netherlands does it. I can go back around one year and a half with my internet banking. But I can only go further back (upto 7 years) after contacting the bank and paying €5,- per transcript (one transcript holds around a month of activities).  I needed a year worth of transcripts for my taxes and had to cough up more than €50. EDIT It seems they recently changed their policy in a way that you can request as many transcripts as you like for a maximum cost of €25,- so the trend to easier access is visible. If you need access to your data beyond the online availability, you download the transactions and manage the archive yourself. Six months to eighteen months is generally enough time for most people to manage their own archived data. Big banks have the power to store and retrieve all the data online. Unfortunately, the older records are not frequently accessed. Why have these records online when they will be rarely accessed? Backing up data will take longer. Queries to retrieve data will take longer. Everything will take longer just so you can have records that 99% of customers will never access.
Like email and spam, fighting creditcard fraud is a cat and mouse game, with technology and processes constantly being developed to reduce fraud. The CVV on the back of the card is just one more layer of security.  Requiring the CVV generally requires you to physically have access to the card. CVV should not be stored by any merchant. This frustrates card skimming fraud as the CVV is not present in the track data and fraud caused by database compromises.  You should never use your PIN online. MC/VISA both have implementations of 3D-Secure (SecureCode for MC and Verified by VISA) which require a password / code to confirm card ownership. Depends on both Issuer and Merchant implementing the standard.  Regarding not needing a PIN at the airport, some low value transactions no longer need PINs, depending on the Issuer and Scheme (VISA/MC). MasterCard PayPass or VISA PayWave enable low value contactless transactions without PIN. In Australia, the maximum value for a contactless transactions is $100 AUD. At some merchants (McDonalds for example) a PIN is not required for for meals purchased with VISA (at least, for the cheeseburger I bought there as a test). This makes sense - if you don't need a PIN for a contactless purchase, why do you need it for a chip based purchase?  So - why allow PIN free transactions? On average customers report stolen credit cards / wallet very quickly and the losses are correspondingly small. As card issuers are always online, cards can be cancelled very quickly after being reported lost / stolen. Finally, by performing transactions for just a few cents or pennies, the merchant (Spotify) can likely validate you are the owner of the card as you'd need access to your online bank to confirm the transactions.  PayPal do this with bank account to confirm ownership. (Unless I've misunderstood your statement). "Well, all of the previous answers already mentioned the upcoming scam and danger situation for your financial position. I thoroughly read all answers and wanted to add a few more lines on it. Cort Ammon) already shows details of it. Any kind of financial transaction involving a complete stranger is the first big scam tag that shows up and this should always 'Never Fall In' type situation. If you open a new bank account or give away any existing bank account to this lady, other than just losing some amount, you might pay earlier than clearing checks you deposited on behalf of your 'stranger' partner. Depending on their target/plan/experience with your bank account they can make you a victim of a bigger crime. There is a full length of scam plans, like sending you false checks to deposit and ask you withdrew money to send them back to even having very big incoming transaction to your account sitting idle on your account which might originate from a crime beyond the financial domain. You can try to be smart, thinking in mind, well, let them send some, I will never send them back before bank declare the deposited checks got horned and clear (and send back the amount after keeping your share). But, still you will face problems later. Even if your account fills up with real money and after confirming with bank you find it OK and never return them (scam a scammer). Still you will not have any valid authority or answer describing how/why you got this money if someone ask you later. Depending on scammer's ability, they might even give you control over fund to spend for your own (to gain some trust from your part). On this type of scam it is a sign of an even bigger danger. I live such a country, Bangladesh, from where recently they successfully transferred out around US$10 millions using a bank account of an outsider like you keeping in between source of money and final unknown destination. The result is the owner / operator of those accounts used for these transfers are now under law enforcement pressure, not only just to find out where ultimately money has gone, but for sure they will face some degree of charge for helping transfer of illegal money overseas"". For someone who is not part of a full scam chain it is a big deal. It might ruin their life forever. To be on the safe side, and help protect others from falling on the same type of problem you may contact your local law enforcement agency. Depending on the situation, they might be interested to run a sting operation using your information and support to catch and stop the crime going to happen soon or later. I would give a rare chance of 2% legitimate reason for anyone to use a third-party bank account to pay some other living either different country (still it is not legal, but a lower-type crime). But obviously they will not ask randomly over the Internet/social network sites. In your case this is a real scam. Be careful and stay safe; Good Luck." "&gt; But I explicitly mentioned the customer experience, which is completely different and no matter how much you want your industry experience to matter for that, it doesn't affect it.  You mentioned the customer experience randomly in some parts, then threw in Wikileaks in others. If we're talking about the customer experience, we need to drop the payment processors aspect, because the majority of the time, the consumer doesn't even know who processes their card payments let alone care, and again, PayPal is not even close to the only option. If this were 1998 and people were really wary of buying online, then it would be a bigger deal to be banned from PayPal. But it's not 1998, and a ton of people don't care, and there are all kinds of alternatives.  PayPal can deny service all it wants (and it does that on a regular basis) and that in no way means that a business can't accept cards. You're ""customer experience"" premise is flawed. I literally spend all day helping businesses set up credit card processing, and PayPal is a drop in the bucket.   &gt;Could you clarify for me how VISA/MasterCard managed to block a merchant, who presumably wasn't a direct customer (but instead a payment processor customer), but cannot block a card holder? (yes, this is an honest question)  Visa and Mastercard have relationships with banks and/or processors, who have relationships with merchants. Visa and MC's agreements with banks and processors stipulate that those banks and processors can't offer services to companies engaging in illegal activity. Wikileaks was (allegedly) engaging in illegal activity, and it's on that basis that Visa and MC denied service to WL.  Visa and Mastercard have almost nothing to do with cardholders. They don't issue credit cards to cardholders, they aren't the ones that do credit checks to determine creditworthiness, they aren't the ones helping you with your monthly statement or a dispute, etc. Cardholders aren't Visa and MC's clients. When a transaction is run, it's authenticated by the bank that issued the card, not by Visa or MC, and it's the bank, not Visa or MC, that would block transactions or freeze a cardholder account.   &gt;The WikiLeaks blockade was clearly political. What makes you say otherwise? And this is political.  So your argument is that anything political is the same as anything else political? Kind of a stretch..  Wikileaks was denied service by the card brands for allegedly engaging in illegal activity. PayPal is denying service of its own volition, which FYI, it does every day to legal businesses. As long as their reasons for doing so aren't discriminatory based on status in a protected class, they are (and should be) allowed to refuse service." You probably don't need to call the bank. Today is Sunday, so three days ago was probably Friday (or Thursday depending on how you count the days). Banks normally don't post transactions on weekends - and transactions that do happen on the weekend sometimes don't get posted until Tuesday. I would give it till Tuesday and then call them if you still don't see it show up on your account. Mainly because they can.  Yes, there is a cost for banks to execute such transactions, and yes, there is a cost to cover the implied risks, but it is far from 3 or 4%. There are banks that charge a flat rate of less than 30$ (and no percentage), so for larger amounts, it is worth shopping around. Note that for smaller amounts, which are the majority of personal transactions, that is probably about as, if not more expensive, than paying 3% - below 1000$, 3% is less than 30$. So charging a percentage is actually better for people that want to transfer smaller amounts. Believe it or not, this is done as a service to you. The reason for this has to do with a fundamental difference between a credit card account and a checking account.  With a credit card account, there is no money in the account; every charge is borrowed money. When you get to your credit limit, your credit transactions will start getting declined, but if the bank does for some reason let one get approved, it's not a big deal for anyone; it just means that you owe a little more than your credit limit. Note that (almost) every credit card transaction today is an electronic transaction.  A checking account, however, has real money in it. When it is gone, it is gone. When a balance inquiry is done, the bank has no way of knowing how many checks you've written that have not been cashed yet. It is a customer's responsibility to know exactly how much money is available to spend.  If you write more checks than you have money for in your account, technically you have committed a crime. Unfortunately, there are too many people now that are not taking the responsibility of calculating their own checking account balance seriously, and bad checks are written all the time. When a bank allows these transactions to be paid even though you don't have enough money in your account, they are preventing a crime from being committed by you. The fee is a finance charge for loaning you the money, but it is also there to encourage you not to spend more than you have.  Even if you use a debit card, it is still tied to a checking account, and the bank doesn't know if you have written enough checks to overdraw your account or not. It is still your responsibility to keep track of your own available balance.  Every time this happens to you, thank the bank as you pay this fee, and then commit to keeping your own running balance and always knowing how much you have left in your account. I have never seen any of my mobile phone providers report any data to any credit agency. They tend to only do that if you don't pay on time. Maybe sometimes it helps, but from my experience over the last decade - it must be some very rare times. It just amazes me that they haven't already. I know people who work at big banks that do nothing but run spreadsheets and analyze the balance boxes all day. The only reason they haven't been automated yet is because their tech guys produce more value working on trading algorithms.