In the era of big data, I find it surprising that banks and credit card companies only offer access to a ridiculously small number of transactions - often only your last 180 days, if that. The longest I've seen was 720 days going back. I suspect they do store everything, but intentionally limit access.

These transactions are text only, take up extremely little space, and storing an individual's lifetime worth of transaction would take less than 10MB of data; about the storage required by two MP3 files, and about 250k records per person per lifetime, if we generously assume everyone makes 10 transactions a day. But I'd be happy with only the last 10 years of transactions, so about 1MB per customer. One of the largest banks, JP Morgan Chase, has ~70MM credit card customers. That means 70TB of data for 10 years of records - hardly impressive for a corporation of that size, with $17B of net income in 2013, when 1TB of cloud storage costs $10 retail per month.

By comparison, would you put up with Gmail or any online email provider keeping only the most recent 120 days worth of email? (And emails do take a lot more space than transactions, are far more numerous, and have to be instantly retrievable.)

Storage requirements for transaction activity are trivial in an era where we're throwing around petabytes and zetabytes.

Is there a sound reason for banks not offering access to all your transactions, other than legacy software on their side?






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