Finance & Banking
Closing the account does not close the file. Money-laundering and tax rules keep your identity and transaction records for years, and a permission to share your data wherever the law allows covers much of the rest. The holds set by statute are the ones no request can move.
The read at a glance
Your passport scan and every transaction you make sit in the same file.
A leak exposes your identity documents alongside your accounts, and a new card does not undo a stolen passport scan.
Anti-money-laundering and tax rules keep identity and transaction records for years after you leave, by law.
Full identity verification is required: passport or licence, often with a face scan.
Industry profile reviewed 23 August 2026. Also machine-readable via the free API.
If it leaks
A finance file names what you hold, what you owe and what you move, beside the ID documents that opened the account. Leaked, it is both the means to impersonate you and the reason to pick you as a target.
What repeats in the policies
The stickiest file you'll hand over
Anti-money-laundering rules set the floor: government ID, commonly a selfie taken to match it, and your transaction history. Identity and transaction records are usually kept about five years after the account closes, and policies let the company keep them longer if it sees fit.
Permitted by law covers a long list
A promise to share your data only where the law permits sounds like a refusal, and what the law permits covers processors, joint marketing, fraud networks and affiliates. Data relabelled de-identified sits outside every other promise in the policy, and it has a documented resale market.
A fraud marker follows you to other firms
Every policy read hands your details to identity and fraud-prevention networks, and the flow runs both ways for the life of the account. Other lenders, banks and insurers check what is on there, so a marker set by one firm can cost you at firms you have never dealt with. The record sits with the network, not with the company that put it there.
What a company here typically holds
Worked out from the industry, not from any one company. What you actually handed over is yours to record.
What this can reveal about you
Built only from what this kind of service actually collects. A dimension that the data does not support is not listed.
Money and net worth Highly likely
Balances and statements reveal it directly.
Where you go Likely
Card transactions map where you are and when.
What lawfully stays after you leave
Two kinds of hold. Law sets it: a statute makes them keep it. They set it: a ground the company grants itself.
Identity / anti-money-laundering records Law sets it about 5 years
Money-laundering rules require ID and transaction records after an account closes.
Financial regulatory records Law sets it around 5 to 7 years
Financial regulators require advice, suitability, and transaction records.
Fraud-prevention markers They set it about 2 to 6 years
To flag suspected fraud, often on a shared industry database you cannot reach through the company.
Tax and accounting records Law sets it about 6 years
Tax and company law makes them keep billing and payment records.
Records tied to a live or potential dispute They set it the limitation period of the claim
They can keep records to defend a live or possible legal claim.
Who wants this data
Bank-transaction data, relabelled anonymous, has been sold at scale by the services that connect apps to your account. More finance policies now reserve the right to train their own AI on customer data.
Sold or shared Possible
Banks are regulated and less ad-driven, but transaction data still feeds credit and fraud scoring.
AI training Moderate
Transaction patterns train fraud and credit models, though the market for that data is narrower than for open web content.
Even anonymised, this can still be you
Four card transactions identify 90% of people (de Montjoye et al., Science, 2015), and a bank keeps every one of yours next to your date of birth and address.
Name, date of birth, postcode Typical
Fifteen demographic attributes re-identify 99.98% of Americans in a released dataset (Rocher, Hendrickx and de Montjoye, Nature Communications, 2019); date of birth, postcode, and sex alone did it for most people in the first study of the problem (Sweeney, 2000).
Location traces Sometimes
Four time-and-place points single out 95% of people in mobility data (de Montjoye et al., Scientific Reports, 2013).
Payment patterns Typical
Four card transactions identify 90% of people in payment data (de Montjoye et al., Science, 2015).
How you write Sometimes
Language models infer where a person lives, their income, and their sex from their writing alone, at near-human accuracy and at scale (Staab et al., ICLR 2024).
Face and voice Typical
A face, voice, or fingerprint template identifies a person directly; there is nothing left to anonymise, and it cannot be reissued like a password.
Browsing fingerprint Sometimes
Browser and device fingerprints were unique for 84% of visitors in the first large study (Eckersley, 2010), and sparse histories of what people viewed re-identified them against public reviews (Narayanan and Shmatikov, 2008).
The studies Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models (Nature Communications 10, 3069, 2019)·Simple Demographics Often Identify People Uniquely (Carnegie Mellon University, Data Privacy Working Paper 3, 2000)·Unique in the Crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility (Scientific Reports 3, 1376, 2013)·Unique in the shopping mall: On the reidentifiability of credit card metadata (Science 347 (6221), 2015)·Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language Models (ICLR 2024, 2024)·How Unique Is Your Web Browser? (Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2010), 2010)·Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, 2008)
The wording that does the work
Clauses that recur across this industry, and what each one actually permits.
“to provide and improve our services”
The catch-all purpose. Analytics, profiling, personalisation and AI training all fit under it. When they want to do something new with your data, this sentence usually already allows it.
The move An objection tells them to use your data to run the service and nothing more.
“we do not sell your personal information”
Usually this means no cash changes hands. Your data can still go to ad networks, analytics firms and partners, because they count that as sharing rather than selling.
The move Use the do-not-sell switch where there is one, and put an objection in writing as well.
“service providers, partners, and affiliates”
This is how your data leaves with no name attached. Recipients are described by what they do rather than named, and you cannot send a request to a company you cannot name.
The move An access request can ask for recipients by name rather than by category, and UK and EU law put that choice with you.
“aggregated or de-identified information”
Taking your name off does not take away the pattern, and the pattern often still points at you. Policies give themselves free use of this data with no end date, on the basis that it is no longer about you.
The move If a deletion comes back as 'anonymised', keep the reply. It usually means de-identified, and it is their claim, not a fact you can check.
“retained as long as necessary, or as required by law”
They can keep it for legal duties, tax rules, fraud prevention, possible lawsuits and their own business reasons. None of those has a firm end date, so deletion turns into something you have to argue for.
The move Which reasons apply to you, and how long each runs, is a request of its own.
“you grant us a licence to use your content”
This is a contract term rather than a data setting, so a privacy request cannot undo it. A careful version ends when your account does. A broad one can be passed on, never expires and survives deletion.
The move Their terms say whether the licence ends when the account does. Close the account and log the date here.
“we do not share your data with third parties except as permitted by law”
It sounds like a refusal, but what the law permits includes processors, affiliates, joint marketing and fraud databases.
The move An access request asks which of them actually received your data.
“we may keep your personal data longer if we cannot delete it for legal, regulatory, or technical reasons”
They can keep data even longer than the law requires, on their own call; technical inconvenience counts as a reason.
The move A retention question makes the reason specific: which one covers your data, and when it ends.
“develop, train, test, and deploy artificial intelligence systems”
Your account and transaction records become training material inside the company. Nothing here limits which models, or says whether one built on your data outlives your account and your deletion.
The move An objection draws the line in writing: run the account, do not train on it.
Their own policy is the one that binds them. Pin it down with a request, and keep the reply.