Taking my bank to the financial ombudsman over their crappy downloadable statements

daveystew

I'm seriously thinking about taking Barlays to the financial ombudsman over their half-hearted statement downloading facility.

You can download your data electronically, but only the last 90 days worth. After that, you can download PDF's, but only if you registered, and only then from the time that you registered. The PDF's themselves are password protected, and even if you do use software to bypass this, the layout is such that it's *completely* useless for any sort of electronic use (accounts, analysis, etc).

It turns out that banks have at least 6 years worth of your data, but they choose only to provide printouts, AND you have to pay £5 for the privilege!

What's maddening is that:

• A CSV is 10 times smaller than a PDF, so it can't be an issue of size.
• They allow you to download electronically anyway, so it can't be an issue of security.
• Doing everything electronically means less work for them, and more convenience for you
• A CSV allows me to analyse my data, so it's going to make me more financially responsible, for sure

This is 2013, and that data should be freely available for account holders to use!

Anyone have any advice / support on:

• The ombudsman route
• A better bank than barclays
• Data

Cheers muchly,
Dave

No-name_2

Strange when I woke up it was 2013!

daveystew

You've time travelled! Thanks, edited

(and at least I'm only one year behind, unlike my bank who are 10 years behind!)

opinions4u

The FOS cannot order your bank to do any more than issue a statement.

Which they do.

So please don't clog up an overloaded system with a pointless complaint. Do business elsewhere if it naffs you off so much.

richardmk

LloydsTSB lets you download at least as far back as 2002.
It can be interesting to go back sometimes and see how much things cost back then compared to now :-)

meer53

The FOS won't look at your complaint unless you've first complained to Barclays. Have you done this already ? They have a huge backlog of complaints due to PPI misselling, some are taking more than 12 months, is it really worth it ? What do you expect them to do for you ?

Gromitt

Online statements are stored seperately to the transactions they keep for 6 years for obvious reasons.

If you go paperless, you can go back years rather than 90 days.

Even if you move banks, you'll only be able to get transactions from now on, so the easiest thing would be to just go paperless.

Personally, I don't download anything. I enter details into my own money management application and then reconcile it with an electronic statement each month and whenever I login during the month. I can go back 10 years now!

daveystew

Yeah, I've been using MS Money for the last 10 years, and I have everything except the last year or so as MS discontinued money, then dropped support for it last year.

I know it all sounds like a strong reaction on my behalf, it's just another example of lazy banking though isn't it? Instead of charging me £16 every time I screw up and go over my overdraft limit (which has been a lot these last few months whilst I wait for client cheques to come in) why don't they spend money on making banking better? Banks seem to love taking, but as soon as you want something from them it's all "Oh we're busy with PPI", or some other lame excuse.

@meer53 yes, I have complained already (I did some research on this) so the first step is done. As for what do I want done, well that's easy. Just expand the existing system to let users download the data (which already exists) in electronic format. It isn't hard - I'm a web developer myself and I write code all day long to do this kind of thing.

Frankly, it's just not good enough.

agrinnall

I don't understand why MS dropping support for Money has caused you to stop using it, I use it in exactly the same way as Grommit and the lack of support (which I've never needed anyway) doesn't seem to prevent me using it pretty much every day.

daveystew

You probably haven't needed to change your hotmail password in that time. As soon as you do that, MSMoney can't authenticate. Unfortunately my account was hacked, so as soon as I change the password back (which allows Money to work again) it allows the hackers back in, and my friends start receiving all sorts of dodgy emails.

meer53

daveystew wrote: »

@meer53 yes, I have complained already (I did some research on this) so the first step is done. As for what do I want done, well that's easy. Just expand the existing system to let users download the data (which already exists) in electronic format. It isn't hard - I'm a web developer myself and I write code all day long to do this kind of thing.

Frankly, it's just not good enough.

So what was Barclays response ?

Unless they receive huge numbers of complaints about this issue, nothing will change just from your complaint.