I'm a big fan of examining the pros and cons of anything, particularly when it comes to technology investments and financial services. It's something we don't do nearly often enough in our business. However, I feel compelled to point out that this post is not a list of cons to paperless statements. It is a list of cons to poor planning and hapless financial management.

Citing a crashed hard drive as a pitfall of e-statements is like citing a house fire as a pitfall of paper statements. Those catastrophes have nothing to do with the choice of statement delivery. Precautions can and should be taken for either. I could offer a similar corollary to every item on this list.

In fact, why in the world do I need a monthly statement when I have 24/7 access to every bit of minutiae regarding every one of my financial accounts? And if I want a statement, why does it have to be monthly? Why not weekly, or quarterly, or yearly? Those are the kinds of questions we should be asking and answering. We have the technology and the capability to address so many of these anachronisms, but our industry just isn't thinking big enough or broad enough. Instead we spend too much time and money on flashy crap like mobile banking that will at best impact 5% of consumers rather than the difficult and pedestrian things like changing outdated processes and regulations to provide choices to a majority of our customers.

Sorry for the rant. "You sly dog. You got me monologuing! I can't believe it."

I've always viewed XPaper as the "happy medium" for the challenges you appropriately cited above. The comfort of having it in paper and the convenience of electronic recovery and retention.

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@Toby

I'll agree with you that these could be considered cons of poor financial management, or in this case poor technology management. But I disagree that these problems "have nothing to with the choice of statement delivery."

Sure they do. If you don't manage your email inbox, remember your password, or secure your computer, electronic statements and alerts are poor substitute for paper statements and financial notifications.

I think people who are comfortable with technology won't have these problems. I use a personal finance management software for managing my finances, hence I don't really need old statements and I know I won't forget anything. I save prompts for all of my passwords, and no, they are not saved on the computer I use. One can argue that banks do not store statement history to reduce costs but I think this is also done for security reasons. Knowing what hackers can do today, I'd rather have my bank get rid of my financial history. Paperless is the way to go and definitely a new way to live in the world affected by the choices we humans make. Including receiving paper statements.

I think Chase has done a great job debunking most of those cons with one simple solution: keeping online statements for 6 years.  You don't have to worry about backups, losing a computer's hard drive, or having a hard time with an auditor.  About the only thing they could do better is keep them for 7 years!  I can't believe these words are leaving my mouth, by imagine if FI's had to be regulated to keep 7 years of statements online for members...

Chase has a great start with simply keeping the online statements for so long and more institutions would be successful in e-statements by addressing the pain points in switching.

I go paperless for routine accounts like the phone or cable bill--moderate amounts with no tax or other lasting consequences. But due to all the practical problems listed in the original post, I want to receive a paper statement for anything complex or important. In the real world, paper statements are much more robust and easy to work with for the average customer, who is busy and doesn't want to take extra time or risk in "managing finances."

Financially organized customers could be sold on paperless statements, but the promised retention of just a few months can be a deal-breaker. If the customer might eventually have to print out the statements to keep them from disappearing, why switch?

To increase paperless adoption, FIs could easily commit to retaining all past statements forever, even for lapsed customers. I can only assume that there is some legal reason not to, or that FIs are not as customer-oriented as other firms using the Internet. Amazon can still show me the details for my first order in 1996!

Is the suggestion that statements be kept long-term by the depository institution? While that sounds convenient, isn't there a fundamental conflict, in that the statements are effectively the consumer's 'receipt' and thus should be in their posession? Not that I'm paranoid (okay, maybe...), but many years ago, I had an incident where my bank "lost" a CD account of mine after it matured. They suddenly had no record of it. Only when I produced my copy of the statements did the situation get resolved.
Perhaps permanent statement storage at a third party would be best.