My favorite day of the month is bank statement day at my company

Silicon Valley Bank is a bank that happens to be in Silicon Valley. It&#x27;s a &quot;Valleyesque&quot; outlier in terms of bank <i>policy</i> — they are terrific at working with startups in unusual situations. (Your average bank equates &quot;unusual situation&quot; to &quot;just hang up the phone&quot;.) But their <i>technology</i> isn&#x27;t like the Tesla of banking or anything. Though they did buy Standard Treasury, so perhaps that&#x27;ll be an interesting direction.

&gt; Silicon Valley Bank gives us no paperless billing option for our account<p>I find that absurd. A bank that primarily serves the tech industry doesn&#x27;t have paperless statements. My banks, all of which are the very definition of entrenched corporations, offer paperless statements.

&gt; E-statement takes 30+ minutes to download because it’s huge and their servers are really slow!<p>They&#x27;re lucky that they&#x27;re able to download after all.<p>Some years ago I used an AmEx to order 1000+ items every day on Amazon, which after a while locked me out of the account pages of both companies. Most probably some database query in the background was timing out due to the volume of transactions.<p>To add insult to injury, I remember it was almost impossible to explain the issue to the support staff on either side. They kept on getting back with canned responses about what browser I was using etc.

US banks seem so backwards in so many ways as an outside observer. Transferring money between accounts of different banks, the prevalence of contactless payments, digital communications as standard, even the fact that cheques still exist.<p>This is all stuff we take for granted in Aus and it just blows my mind each and every time it comes up that US banks are so behind the times.

I worked on a project migrating a telco to a new billing system. Somehow the new system churned out, for only one guy, 144 copies of his bill. No idea how a gross became a thing in a computer, but it did.<p>The mailhouse, rather than do the sensible thing and call us to see why, did optimise the delivery and collect all the copies together and post in a single box. Crazy.

And its called &quot;Silicon Valley Bank&quot; on top of that. You would think they would be the first to adopt tech, not the last. Do banks still have any legal reasons to not allow paperless statements ?

For those who don&#x27;t know, Silicon Valley Bank provides merchant banking services for a pretty big fraction of Bay Area start-ups. They have a reputation for &quot;getting it,&quot; in terms of being able to support venture-backed pre-revenue companies. This does make the giant paper statement even more ironic.

Check the comment on the article:<p><pre><code> Recommended by Yan Lhert (author) Go to the profile of Silicon Valley Bank Silicon Valley Bank 5 hrs ago Got it. We’re looking into it.</code></pre>

That&#x27;s the dumbest thing I&#x27;ve seen in a very long time.<p>Also, if it&#x27;s costing the bank $41 per month this must surely be getting passed on to OP somehow - they can&#x27;t be making a loss on his account? I wonder what OP pays the bank?

How about just having your company use a non-SVB credit card (or debit card) and just pay off the bill via the SVB account? Have you tried calling up SVB and resolving it with them directly?

&quot;We do hundreds of thousands of searches with the DMV every month, who charge us a fee by credit card for each transaction, and gives us no other payment method&quot;<p>This is retarded. DMV should offer a one-off monthly subscription for unlimited searches, or just save each search and produce a bill at the end of the month. I&#x27;m sure banks are making an absolute killing on those searches.<p>&quot;Silicon Valley Bank gives us no paperless billing option for our account&quot;<p>Is this 2016? Or 1970?

30 minutes to download the bank statement? No paperless billing?<p>so many questions about this amazing bank.

&quot;<i>Silicon Valley Bank</i> gives us no paperless billing option for our account&quot;<p>... sigh

I&#x27;m suddenly nostalgic for the annoying buzz of dot matrix printers.

US banks (and consumers) are stuck in the stone age. Paper cheques, magnetic swipe cards, it&#x27;s pretty bad.

Millions of dollars a month in DMV records searches, that&#x27;s the more interesting part to me. Background checks? Carfax but for the past owners of the car?

My favorite part is that the transactions are printed <i>single-column.</i> Look at all that white space.

The strangest part of the story to me is that the state charges for each search individually. PA.gov appears to require the creation of an account, so they could save themselves a big chunk of money by charging the customer once a month. I was formerly employed at a portal similar to PA.gov in another state, and this is exactly what we did. I can&#x27;t think of any good reason to charge by the drink, so it&#x27;s probably some well-meaning but boneheaded state reg.

Relevant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;what-startups-think-about-silicon-valley-bank" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;priceonomics.com&#x2F;what-startups-think-about-silicon-v...</a><p>Personally I&#x27;ve been very happy with Capital One business banking for my startup. One time painless in-person setup at a branch, everything done online ever since, paperless from the start, free checking, savings, and business credit cards for everyone. 1% APY on our balance.

You can open an operational credit card account at a traditional bank outside of SVB and keep your primary banking relationship with them. I would expect American Express will give you the month-to-month cash flow and paperless billing while SVB can give you the larger line of credit and growth capital. Plus, think of all those credit card points.

We use SVB and luckily don&#x27;t have this many transactions :)<p>We once had a Bell Atlantic (that&#x27;s Verizon now) phone bill delivered that took 1&#x2F;3 of a UPS truck. 600 line hunt group that they broke so that instead of being a hunt group, it was don&#x27;t-answer-call-forward from the 1st to 2nd, 2nd to 3rd, and on up. At a cost of $.08 per hunt. So if lines 1-599 were busy that&#x27;d be 599 $.08 charges. For each accepted call to our modems. And each charge itemized one per page. On little index card sized phone bill pages. Mid month they called and asked if we could take our bills on reel-reel tapes, which I guess should have been an early warning sign...<p>So anyway, thus was the 400,000-ish printed page phone bill.

Off-topic: What are they doing that requires &quot;hundreds of thousands of searches with the DMV&quot; every month?

Which banks <i>do</i> provide paperless billing for business accounts, and what specific policy reason -- compliance? Record keeping? -- prevents SVB from doing it?<p>You know, the people responsible for printing and shipping? The expense&#x2F;hassle is not lost on them. I&#x27;m curious to know more.

Before I moved to Seattle, my old three-branch credit union in Podunk County, Flyover State had paperless statements, and that was years and years ago. &quot;Silicon Valley Bank&quot;, in 2016, doesn&#x27;t?

Did you check that the statement is correct? Feels like someone is bound to drop a piece of paper or ten when refilling the printer. You can probably even do it by weight, 1g ~= $10-100.

Reminds me of when I look at my cell phone bill and see nearly every transferred KB itemized. At least it&#x27;s paperless.

it seems to me that taking time out of your day to put down some one who is a partner to your business would be better spent making your business better