Keep Physical Documents Says UK government

friolento

…..had to be original bank statement not a download

Nobody can tell whether the piece of paper was sent by a bank in the Post, or has been printed from a PDF provided by a bank.

Fair enough, if you don’t have a printer, or access to a printer in e.g. a Library, printing yourself is not an option. But it seems a huge waste of resources (electricity, hardware, ink, paper, transport, delivery etc) to have regular statements coming, just in case someone might ask for one.

masonic

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180330#Comment_82180330

It would be vanishingly unlikely that an FCA authorised financial institution would permanently lose its records, but I do have an anecdote related to a fraudulent peer-to-peer lending firm that went through something similar.

Collateral operated in the P2P lending space up to February 2018, when the FCA finally realised it had fraudulently modified the Financial Services Register entry for a different company to make it look authorised when it was not. The website abruptly went offline under the guise of an "IT technical issue".

In the lead up to these events, the electronic platform had been decommissioned due to non-payment of outstanding bills and when BDO was appointed and met with the directors, they did not consider they would be able to recover the platform or the underlying data.

There were offsite backups held with a hosting provider that were also in the process of being deleted for non-payment of bills, but some raw server images were recovered, which formed the basis of an extensive 18 month forensic reconstruction, which was eventually successful.

Because the live platform was cut off and unavailable, investor-side statements and transaction confirmations became the initial primary evidence of who had deposited what. Even though those personal records were essential for making initial claims, the administrators still could not issue payouts based on self-submitted statements, emails, and screenshots alone. They were obligated to verify every claim against underlying banking records and server logs once those were eventually extracted.

So I do not think anyone should expect to walk into a bank branch during an IT failure and their printed bank statement to be honoured as a true record of their account, against which they could claim money to be paid out to them.

molerat

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180367#Comment_82180367

Makes me laugh when one of the "banks", who are driving us towards paperless for their own costs / convenience, ask for hard copies of something they don't want to produce themselves. I did have to provide a hard copy "real" bank statement to HL as part of my ID requirements to start my drawdown. I do download and keep digital copies of bank statements etc. Interestingly there was a case on another forum where an energy supplier stopped access to historical documents when the user changed e-mail address for "security" reasons. There is little reason though to keep paper records, they take up a heck of a lot of storage space for little benefit, digital would be sufficient for any of these disaster recovery scenarios.

UKX69

PAPER RECORDS

Anyway, it’s up to the individual to keep their records in anyway they see fit. We all have our preferences.

GeoffTF

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180383#Comment_82180383

I believe that Beaufort Securities and SVS Securities were the most recent cases where investments were missing. IIRC there were reports that the administrators asked customers for copies of statements in at least one of those cases.

UKX69

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180399#Comment_82180399

Exactly the point I wanted to make. 👍

GeoffTF

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180378#Comment_82180378

I think the point here is that the only new piece of advice is to keep physical copies of documents. The example given was taking screen shots of bank and pension statements. (Perhaps the last pdf statements issued were not considered to be recent enough.) That was deemed to be newsworthy, the rest was old hat. They seemed to be talking about electronic physical copies, not paper ones. Magnetisation or electric charges rather than ink.

masonic

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180408#Comment_82180408

There's not really any excuse for this. Banks have had the capability to issue digitally signed PDF statements for years. I know that Starling offers this service to customers, I don't know if any of the other banks do it, but these are better than a paper statement that really requires extensive checking with the source bank to guard against tampering.

eskbanker

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180401#Comment_82180401

I think @masonic's example was more relevant, where such copies weren't enough to actually resolve the matter, but happy to be corrected with any facts to the contrary, and even if customers in those cases had been able to secure payouts from statement copies, it still seems far less likely to be applicable to the transactional world of banking, i.e. rocking up to a bank branch with last month's statement is unlikely to be accepted as evidence of current balance!

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82180410#Comment_82180410

I don't really think it was a piece of advice as such, but if this was to become government policy it would be disseminated through the usual channels, including the NCSC site promoted by the minister, rather than an 'on the hoof' reaction to a multi-subject question in a brief TV interview.

GeoffTF

I think @masonic's example was more relevant, where such copies weren't enough to actually resolve the matter, but happy to be corrected with any facts to the contrary, and even if customers in those cases had been able to secure payouts from statement copies, it still seems far less likely to be applicable to the transactional world of banking, i.e. rocking up to a bank branch with last month's statement is unlikely to be accepted as evidence of current balance!

Yes, I have already hinted at that. The suggestion that we should take screen shots (presumably after every transaction) does not help much either. There could have been further transactions after the screen shot was taken. There would be a difficult situation if the bank's records were destroyed completely. All we would have then would be the customers' statements and the records of any surviving banks. The customer could have a term account that matured after the bank was destroyed though.