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Keep Physical Documents Says UK government
Comments
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But did he address the point raised above about exactly how pieces of paper would "protect against loss of access to computer systems", in the context of access to banking services that are themselves dependent on such systems?
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I do not believe that keeping paper copies of every financial document was intended. A local electronic copy would be fine in a network outage. You should also follow the usual advice regarding backups.
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But even then, being able to read a statement locally (in whatever form) if a bank's systems are out of action seems scant consolation if it's impossible to make payments, etc, by virtue of that outage?
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The advice did not make a lot of sense. In the real world, I do not believe that turning up at a branch with statements on a laptop (or paper statements) would help much if the bank's systems were down. Some online trading platforms have collapsed without proper records of who owns what. It is not impossible that a bank's records could be mangled or destroyed.
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Everyone seems to be getting their panties in a bunch over what the minister is reported to have said.
Instead, why not watch it and then we won't need numerous postings attempting to paraphrase, precis or explain his comments?
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Personally I don't think that it's a particularly credible suggestion that a bank's records could be mangled or destroyed to the extent that statements retained by customers would have any role to play in addressing that!
I'm all in favour of keeping local copies of statements rather than relying on the ability to access these via bank portals, but to me that's simply a record-keeping precaution (primarily against access being withdrawn by the bank), rather than perceiving it as something that would come in useful if needing to transact during outages.
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Funnily enough, I had correspondence with Bucks BS only the other week over withdrawal of funds and needed to confirm name and address and one document had to be original bank statement not a download. Anyway, I look upon paperwork as part of the hobby and enjoyment of the savings and banking experience in much the same way as when I used to buy and sell stocks over the phone, chat with the brokers and keep the stocks in certificated form.
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Personally I don't think that it's a particularly credible suggestion that a bank's records could be mangled or destroyed to the extent that statements retained by customers would have any role to play in addressing that!
That has happened in peace time with some investment platforms. There are some small banks that might be easier targets than the big banks. Nonetheless, we recently had three big banks go down with a Google cloud outage. What would happen if their access was permanently removed at a stroke of Trump's pen? What would happen if their data centres and backup sites were destroyed by military strikes?
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After viewing that, I think the surrounding debate on here is entirely justified!
It's a two minute interview, halfway through which the interviewer leads the minister with a hotch-potch of stuff she's seen online, including (from memory) keeping devices updated, enabling two-factor authentication, and even taking photos of bank or pension statements. His answer broadly agrees with such measures but is understandably more focused on directing people towards the resources at the National Cyber Security Centre, so, although he does briefly agree with keeping physical copies (without elaborating on their potential use), it doesn't seem particularly realistic to me for that to be summarised by Sky as the key message to take away ("AI Minister Kanishka Narayan discusses the concerns on using AI to upload important documents and urges the public to keep physical documents amid deep concerns over AI").
I'm sure that AI-based transcription services could be used to generate the actual text rather than having to view video clips, but as far as I can see the NCSC guidance he refers to is standard generic sensible stuff about the importance of backups, rather than recommending paper-based bank statements as such…
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Which investment platforms failed to the extent that statements independently saved by customers played a role in reconstructing entitlements?
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