Guide
Open banking: the route that skips conversion entirely
Updated
The reason bank statement converters exist is that people need transaction data. For a current UK account, that data is available as data, and the file never has to be created or moved.
What it is
Open Banking describes it as a simple, secure way to help you move, manage and make more of your money, enabling new ways for consumers and businesses to access financial services built on secure systems from regulated providers.
For this purpose the practical meaning is narrow and useful: an app or website you authorise can read your transactions directly, as records rather than as a document.
Who is allowed to
Only apps and websites provided by firms regulated by the FCA or a European equivalent can enrol in the Open Banking Directory. That is a meaningful filter, and it is the thing a random converter site does not pass.
Access requires your explicit consent, given to a regulated firm, and Open Banking states plainly that you choose which apps and websites you use, that you decide what information a firm can access and for how long, and that you can withdraw consent through the app or by contacting your bank.
The password line
You will never be asked to give access to your bank login details or password to anyone other than your own bank or building society. That single sentence separates open banking from screen scraping, and it is the test worth applying to anything offering to fetch your transactions.
Anything that asks for your online banking credentials is not open banking, whatever it calls itself.
What it does not solve
History. A feed reaches whatever window the bank exposes, which is not six years of statements in a drawer, and it reaches nothing at all for an account you have closed.
That is the honest boundary of this route, and it is exactly where converting a PDF becomes the right answer rather than the lazy one. The mistake is not converting; it is converting current data that could have been read directly.