Bank statements from closed accounts - Lloyds and Halifax?

eskbanker

The Data Protection Act mandates that organisations keep personal data for no longer than necessary, but isn't prescriptive about how long that is, so the definition of 'necessity' is open to interpretation according to each organisation's own processes.

Theoretically, Bank A could have a retention policy of three years for transactional data and Bank B could have one of ten years (I don't believe there's an FCA-imposed standard for retail banking transactions?), but a policy of "access to all transactions for all accounts ever held" isn't going to be compliant....

polymaff

My usual stance is "for this and the previous tax year" and even that is treated as my asking for the moon and sixpence.

londoninvestor

eskbanker wrote: »

but a policy of "access to all transactions for all accounts ever held" isn't going to be compliant....

Even with an explicit customer opt-in?

eskbanker

polymaff wrote: »

My usual stance is "for this and the previous tax year" and even that is treated as my asking for the moon and sixpence.

Asking for something rendered obsolete 48 years ago is always going to be challenging, with or without Data Protection Act retention policies!

eskbanker

londoninvestor wrote: »

eskbanker wrote: »

but a policy of "access to all transactions for all accounts ever held" isn't going to be compliant....

Even with an explicit customer opt-in?

Yes, this is all about data retention policies, not customer consent - banks (and other organisations too to be fair) can't be expected to operate customer-specific retention policies and will simply automatically wipe everything over x years old from their systems, regardless of customer preferences.

Having said that, customers do have post-GDPR rights to insist on personal data being deleted before such automatic purging, but I'd imagine that transactional data held by banks may be exempt from this.

stevenpc

seashore22 wrote: »

Due to a domestic abuse situation in our family we need to access some old bank statements. The person who had the accounts had to leave suddenly and couldn't take any information about the closed accounts with her.

Lloyds - 2009 - 2014. Account was closed in 2014.

Halifax - 2014 - 2016. Account was closed in 2016.

We went in to Lloyds and they were very helpful, although they could only print off credits to the account from 2009 and 2010 on the day, not debits and not full statements.

Halifax were useless. They printed off a list of figures, with no information about what they were for or even if they were credits/debits.

Does anyone know where we go from here? How do we get the information we need? Proper statements would be ideal, but a list of credits and where they came from would go some way to helping.

We might go back to Lloyds and see if they will provide info for the years 2011 to 2014. I think time pressures meant they could only do the 2 years on the day, so it may be possible to obtain more next week.

Thanks.

I was able to get 6 years bank statements from lloyds for closed accounts.My local branch said it wasnt posible but when i phoned lloyds london head office they where very helpfull and as i still had an active cc with them there was no charge.they provided bank statements for 3 closed accounts that where closed.the last one closed was in 2014.They provide all full statements but due to there postage limits had to send in 3 separate packages on 3 dif days.

seashore22

stevenpc wrote: »

I was able to get 6 years bank statements from lloyds for closed accounts.My local branch said it wasnt posible but when i phoned lloyds london head office they where very helpfull and as i still had an active cc with them there was no charge.they provided bank statements for 3 closed accounts that where closed.the last one closed was in 2014.They provide all full statements but due to there postage limits had to send in 3 separate packages on 3 dif days.

Thank you so much for that. We have the account numbers and the person concerned has a current account with Lloyds at the moment, so it should be relatively straightforward.