Picking up on Andy Pandy's article about Euro cash machines, but without wishing to hijack that thread, I noticed he said that he had been warned about the exchange rate for such machines via his Nationwide statement. I got no similar warning with my Nationwide statements at the end of December. I have, however, opted for electronic statements which might be missing such additional information.
Many utility and financial services now seem to offer "paperless" accounting via electronic statements but I remain sceptical of the reliability and capability of the organisations offering them.
I had a poor experience with Scottish & Southern Energy about a year ago when I realised that I wasn't receiving notifications of new statements. Fortunately my ISP was sufficiently knowledgeable and efficient to be able to trace the problem for me from their logs. I discovered that Scottish & Southern's automated statement emails were malformed and non-compliant with the RFC standard, thereby causing my ISP to reject them at the SMTP envelope negotiation stage. It was complicated by the fact that emails from their Customer Services department were properly formed and were all delivered correctly.
The Scottish & Southern Customer Services department, whilst always polite and trying to be helpful, failed utterly to understand the issue. They noted that other customers with Hotmail accounts had also seen non-delivery problems and suggested that I change my ISP. When I explained the problem again, and after jumping almost insurmountable hurdles in trying to get a message through to their "IT Department", they introduced a completely new error. I had to ask to revert to paper statements.
With regard to Nationwide, they do not send an email notification whenever a new electronic statement has been prepared (other than for the Credit Card) and rely upon customers logging on and checking for themselves. Nationwide do say that statements will remain available online for 3(?) years. I am in the habit of maintaining my own records, however, and I always download my statements and archive them against possible problems in the future, were I ever to encounter a disputed transaction. I do wonder whether my personal archives of paperless statements will be worth the electrons they haven't been printed on, if ever disputed.