Why do CC statements take so long to be generated?

[Anonymous]

More of a philosophical question but maybe someone has some inside info, and I'm just curious.

I have nine cards and it really depends on the bank. U.S. Bank is always bang-bang, available on the next business day. Others, like Alliant and Barclays, often take 2-3 business days to show up. Another curious thing with Alliant is that my cashback earned and new due date/amount show up pretty quickly, yet it still takes days to see the actual document.

It seems to me it should be a totally automated process... as of 11:59 PM on the closing date, they have all the posted transactions and you'd think they could generate the statement instantly. Most of my deposit accounts work that way and will show a statement immediately on the 1st of the month (sometimes even after close of business on the 31st).

So what's taking (certain) credit card companies so long?

[Anonymous]

2-3 business days isn't a long time imo. Some actually take longer. Example, my discover is due on the 18th, but doesn't post until the 23rd, which is 5 days. Maybe I'm just programmed now to their timeline lol. 

[Revelate]

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@Anonymous wrote:

2-3 business days isn't a long time imo. Some actually take longer. Example, my discover is due on the 18th, but doesn't post until the 23rd, which is 5 days. Maybe I'm just programmed now to their timeline lol. 

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 Given the machines run 24x7 I don't know why.  Seems inane in this day and age, but whatever.  

There's probably a historical reason around pending charges and disputes but I don't know enough to opine what that was or if it's even still necessary.  The fact that different lenders do it differently suggests there was a former reason and it's gone but people just never went and updated the infrastructure.

To be fair, things like statement generation are absolutely critical importance to the banks and as such they may just not have touched those systems.  You break it, the whole company buys it (the farm that is).

ETA: really shouldn't in this day and age but old habits die hard.

[UpperNwGuy]

I don't even look at my credit card statements.  I log into my online account every few days to make sure the charges are posting correctly, and once or twice a month I pay off the balance.  There's no information on the credit card statement that I don't see when I log in, so the bank can take as long as they want as far as I am concerned.

[Anonymous]

Statements aren't always produced by the FI itself, some banks farm this out to other companies... they send a data feed and another company produces the statements, whether in PDF or printed form.  Depending on the service agreement and timing, this could take a day or three from the time the FI produces and delivers the data.

[Anonymous]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Statements aren't always produced by the FI itself, some banks farm this out to other companies... they send a data feed and another company produces the statements, whether in PDF or printed form.  Depending on the service agreement and timing, this could take a day or three from the time the FI produces and delivers the data.

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Farming out was a bigger thing in the past when mailing statements was the way to go. Maybe some still do it, not sure.

But most statements are pdfs now, and it's easier to produce. 

That being said,  there are millions of pdfs to produce daily.  It's one of the reasons closing dates are staggered. It actually takes a small amount of time to produce the pdf file itself and a little bit of time to store them on networks. Not a lot of time, but when you are talking millions, it adds up.

Some will produce using multiple servers, which means several batches can run at the same time. Its possible that the issuers who get them out quickly have more separate batches running at the same time (or fewer accounts). In this case, it would be a IT infrastructure difference between the banks.

[Revelate]

But big problem with that analysis. 

If they were falling behind because of batch latency we would see more variability in it.  It doesn't take that long to write millions of files a day, was doing that years ago solved tech.  Color me skeptical.

Good point on the outsourcing, same argument it isn't long to build a PDF, write it to disk, copy it across the network back to customer, and update the record in the database.   Concurrency challenge sure but it's been done for a while and the trend in various places has been to increase frequency of data batches to get closer to real time data and that has been going on for the last two decades.

It probably goes back to money and there really isn't incentive to fix it, or things go wrong (which they do) and they just have the buffer.  The earlier point was correct I basically never look at my statement and actually never have since I started using credit cards, the year end summary gets a casual glance but I get the aggregate data from that in other tools anyway these days.

I never had an account at any of the banks I worked at and so never saw that side of their policies.  Maybe next time I'll pay closer attention but my career went back to the network and of course cloud these days, no longer doing core application / database work generally.  Though I can say the network connections for all those outsourced processes are still there in various banks though everyone was trying to bring some of that in house (with varying degrees of success).

[Anonymous]

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@Revelate wrote:

But big problem with that analysis. 

If they were falling behind because of batch latency we would see more variability in it.  It doesn't take that long to write millions of files a day, was doing that years ago solved tech.  Color me skeptical.

Good point on the outsourcing, same argument it isn't long to build a PDF, write it to disk, copy it across the network back to customer, and update the record in the database.   Concurrency challenge sure but it's been done for a while and the trend in various places has been to increase frequency of data batches to get closer to real time data and that has been going on for the last two decades.

It probably goes back to money and there really isn't incentive to fix it, or things go wrong (which they do) and they just have the buffer.  The earlier point was correct I basically never look at my statement and actually never have since I started using credit cards, the year end summary gets a casual glance but I get the aggregate data from that in other tools anyway these days.

I never had an account at any of the banks I worked at and so never saw that side of their policies.  Maybe next time I'll pay closer attention but my career went back to the network and of course cloud these days, no longer doing core application / database work generally.  Though I can say the network connections for all those outsourced processes are still there in various banks though everyone was trying to bring some of that in house (with varying degrees of success).

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Pdf creation is much slower than simple text files. Fitting text into a new document type that is picture-based does take a little time, especially when you are adding headers, logos, special formatting, etc. There is the overhead of document management that is included in the document itself.

My statements typically take 100-300k of storage. A lot larger than a flat file.  Transferring hundreds or thousands of them makes a difference. Some of the older pdf creation engines would create simple files over 500K each. That would be significant for large batches. 

Banks could invest in state of the art hardware and get them generated very quickly. And some do. Others don't care to spend the money because a day or 2 is good enough for them. 

I have every statement (or almost every one) from all my current cards from the time of account opening, stored on the cloud. My 1 page Citi statement from 2001 is 202K. My latest 3 page Citi statement, with graphical headers and panels is 290K. More efficient with space now.