[saghm]

> Every year I find a mistake in at least one bank statement. And it's always in the bank's favor. Sometimes it's a few cents, but once it was a few hundred dollars across multiple errors.

How much time have you spent on this overall compared to the amount of money you saved by noticing these errors? I certainly don't think it's fair for banks to get away with this, but I'm not convinced that tracking things at that level of detail would be worth it for most people

[pan69]

How do we know that banks are making these errors if no one checks? It might be a few bucks on your account here and there but if that happens over millions of customers... That's a nice little scheme for banks to get away with.

[saghm]

We don't, unless they take a large enough mount that someone notices anyways. To me, that's more an argument that there should be more regulation here (Glass-Steagall was mentioned in another comment, which doesn't directly address this specific issue but it helps address perverse incentives in general) than the idea that people should have to spend time on this. Given how vital banks are to modern life and the number of purchases that an average household would need to check against each month, this seems like a case where the common good is better served by holistic changes than telling people "just do the work yourself". I'm politically more on the left than the average person though, so obviously opinions here will differ.

[sowbug]

Startup idea: we audit your financial accounts for you. Do a Plaid-style link, and we take it from there. Charge whatever antivirus subscriptions cost.

Of course the startup also charges banks to find errors in the customers' favor.