Dear Silicon Valley Bank, Can You Please Give Me My Data?
Most startup founders I know use Silicon Valley Bank. They have a friendly support team, sometimes throw good parties, and up until yesterday, I’ve been reasonably happy with them. They’ve always had a clumsy interface but I didn’t realize just how bad it was until I needed to complete a bigger task and I stumbled into somewhat of a nightmare. I can no longer recommend Silicon Valley Bank to anyone in the startup world and I’m looking for another bank to move my company to.
A Walkthrough of SVBConnect.com
My task is pretty simple. I am doing my corporate taxes. All I need is a file of all of the transactions my company performed in 2012 that I can give to our accountant. We don’t have many transactions and this seems easy enough, so I select download and land on this page:
SVB asks me to put in a date range for my data so I type the 2012 calendar year, click submit, and get this:
So this sucks. Instead of being able to get a single file to send to our accountant, I’m going to need to download 12 individual files and send it to him. Annoying but not the end of the world. I start going through the months to download the files then I notice this.
Oh fuck. This is bad. If there is a 13 month limit that means we can only download four individual months from 2012.
I assume this is a mistake, some weird limitation of the page, so I start clicking around the site to find a place that will give me access to my data.
Their nav bar gives me a bunch of options, I click on all of them and nothing seems to help. The 7 options I get under ‘Queries’ all have the same constraint. I only have 13 months of data.
I thought ‘Special Reports’ might help me. Even if there was this limit on the data they might have already anticipated that most companies need a year-end report so they could have saved a version of it there. I click and land on what is essentially a confusing blank page.
The only page that allows me to access my data beyond 13 months is the “Statements” page. I can access my old data but there’s a catch, the data is only available as a PDF .
!!@#~@#!@#!@#!@#!#@!@#!@#!@#!@#!@#!@#!@#!@#@!@#
What started as a task that could take 15 seconds has transformed into something that could wreck a day and end up costing us an incredible amount of money. We will now need to spend hours or pay our accountant by the hour, to manually take the data from the PDFs and enter it into a format that is readable. The technical co-founder of our company is looking into ways to do this with a script but it’s possible that this could be another time suck, won’t result in a clean conversion, and could screw up our taxes. (If it works we’ll release the code for others to use)
We though, are even more set back than I originally thought. SVB doesn’t give you full access to your PDF archive of statements, they delete them if they are over 18 months old. This means that three months are not accounted for and the only way that I currently can think of to find them, is to dig through our physical records, find the statements, scan them, and upload them back to the web.
I called SVB in the midst of this yesterday to try to see what they could do. All of the people I talked to at SVB were friendly and seemed to understand the problems I was hitting but this is also what is disconcerting. They are aware of these problems and have not pushed any major changes to their interface or database structure in years. A person I talked to said that they were expecting to make some changes but they wouldn’t be released until next year and was pretty stumped about any way to help us out of our current situation.
Silicon Valley Bank is a cool company. It spends an incredible amount of money attempting to protect that image but if its tech sucks then it that does not live up to its name. The tech that powers a bank designed to help those making tech can not be an archaic piece of shit.
If there is anyone at SVB reading this who can figure out a way to give us our data, please contact me. If there is anyone out there who has encountered this before and has a way to clear it, please contact me.
cody@scrollkit.com
UPDATE
SVB’s head of client services called my cell after this post went up. She put in a specific request to the tech team to get my data and I received it 24 hours later.
We talked about their plans for the site, told me that she understood my frustration, but also said that no changes to the site will come until, at the very earliest, the start of the new year.
