For both my bank accounts I can only access 18 months of history.
To access older account history, you have to pay a certain amount of money for each old statement. Why do banks do that? Shouldn't this practice go away as we get bigger hard disks and cheaper storage?
There is no technical limitation. Banks have to make money, and charging for relatively obscure services is one of the ways they do that.
I don't think it's near as much a tech. limitation as it is a $ generator like all the other bank fees.
I do imagine though, banks thought about this and felt besides making $ that the majority of users out their will be more than happy with 18 months and thus charging to go back further is a reasonable charge.
They want your money. I doubt there is a huge tech limitation on this. Banks are greedy. You only need older statments once in a while. If you do, you are probably willing to pay.
As a former bank employee, my feeling is that most banks are lazy and do the bare minimum to keep customers.
The Achilles Heel of nearly all data storage solutions is backup. Nobody wants to keep data that is infrequently accessed on-line if they don't have to because online data costs more than offline data. Unfortunately, once the data is no longer online, it becomes much harder to get at, often involving manual processes. Whether the data is truly not available online anymore or not, this is the origin of the fee for accessing older data.
I know that we remove older data for our students about 13 months after they leave the University. And, yes, we too charge a fee to recover the data once it has been removed to offline storage.
It may seem like it's relatively simple to keep a 'disk' of data, but that doesn't take in to account the layers and layers of redundancy and back-ups that this data requires across several systems. Often times the data to generate a single statement includes hundreds if not thousands of transactions and data points, and many times these statements are generated to display to the user from raw data.
Speaking from experience, we aim to keep seven years of data in live systems, and after that, the system may either move to 'non-live backup' or discard altogether.