Why would a bank reduce the retention period for online credit card statements?

Hi all,

Last week I received a notice from my credit card issuer (Scotiabank Visa) concerning some revised terms of contract for my personal card. (Yes, they’re probably allowed to do that.)

Among the new terms, they say they will no longer retain online credit card statements for 12 months, but only for 90 days. They advise downloading them regularly.

I’ve heard of other Canadian banks doing this sort of thing, especially for corporate credit cards.

This is 2016. Even if they have 1 million customers, those extra 9 months would fit easily on a 200-dollar hard drive. Maybe 1000 dollars for a RAID array.

Why would they do this? Doesn’t it contradict all those advertisements encouraging people to use online statements?

Because they probably have a service to retrieve older statement for a fee and they are betting a lot of people will pay that fee.

They seem to have 23 million customers. Commercial data centers do not simply order a new hard drive from NewEgg. My company supports the U.S. Department of Education, and their data center contractor charges them surprisingly high amounts to manage 1G of disk space each month. It’s not just the cost of a drive–you have to provide power, 24x7 availability, backup and retrieval, disaster recovery–the list goes on.

That being said the cost is probably still very small compared to their overall operations and the cynic in me says that Alley Dweller has the right idea. My bank is Bank of America and I don’t think they store the actual statements; I think they store account data, which has a very small footprint, and generate PDF statements on the fly if you request one (still only ~375KB for one statement).

I think it might be to make it more difficult to get a clear picture of how much money you spend on interest and penalties, if you want to look.

It’s hard to picture a scenario where the issuing bank gets some kind of advantage when their customer looks at older statements, but easy to picture scenarios where it’s a disadvantage. I think they’re probably not trying to make anything impossible, just erect more barriers to cause more customers to give up looking.

Just this past month I had a bit of difficulty with my electric utility company, having to do with their on-line billing. After several attempts to resolve this (with the final result that my problem with it was partially resolved), I said: Just fuck it, start sending me paper bills via snail-mail again, just like we used to do it back in the 1890’s. It worked then, and it still works now.

Thanks, I see the big idea now. It’s typically devious.

Amazon’s public pricing for S3 ($0.03/(GB*month) plus access fees) gives some idea of the fully loaded cost, complete with redundancy across multiple datacenters and stuff. The credit card company might have inefficient legacy IT that makes the cost to them much higher. I’d still suspect that their reasons are mostly devious, though.

I agree with ‘devious’, but they may be shooting themselves in the foot if a lot of customers elect to go back to paper.

There are a lot of cases now where we are expected to print our own stuff - I just renewed my insurance and it’s all online. If I want a document I have to print my own.

Maybe not…they will just charge a $2 “paper statement fee” to take care of any costs. I know that my credit union has such a fee. I’m waiting for the day when they have a matching $2 “convenience fee” for electronic statements.