‘Stop reminding me’ is never an option.

Allow me a rant: I hate being asked to sign up for paperless billing. It is a regular source of hectoring from banks, credit card companies, mortgage lenders, student-loan lenders, 401(k) and 529 plans, and just about anybody else to whom I owe periodic payments, or with whom I have money saved or invested. In today’s world, that’s a long list, and it gets longer when one adds in the times when I need to help out older or younger family members with some financial question.

The sign-up requests are irritating enough. My bank, for example, asks me every time I log on whether I want to sign up for paperless, or be reminded later. “Stop reminding me” is never an option. If you just once accidentally click the wrong place, you have to go digging through the site for how to undo it.

Paperless does have advantages: it saves physical storage space, as well as the regular weekly hassle of wading through the mail and separating out what should be saved, what can be thrown out (e.g., window envelopes), and what must be recycled. Of course, it has much larger advantages to the financial companies, which can save on mail costs, which is why they push it so hard. Regulators in some jurisdictions, such as Canada and the European Union, have favored compulsion to use paperless statements in some settings, in part out of stated concerns for the environmental impact of paper mail. American regulators have tended to be more circumspect; for example, one 2022 comment letter from consumer groups to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau argued that credit card customers were likelier to incur late fees when they do not receive physical bills:

One of the relatively more recent practices that has become a trigger for late fees is when consumers are required or pushed into receiving periodic statements online. The credit card industry has made constant, aggressive, and sometimes deceptive, efforts to move consumers from mailed paper periodic statements to online-only statements. One of the many drawbacks to online-only statements is that consumers often overlook the email notification that their statement is available, or it gets buried in an avalanche of new emails, which results in the consumer being late in their payment. We documented this issue in our 2016 report on protecting paper statements . . . and our 2015 report on deferred interest promotion abuses. Since that time, these issues have continued, while the number of consumers with online-only statement has increased from 25% in 2013 . . . to 56% of cardholders in 2020.

This is one reason why I especially avoid paperless statements for any bill that isn’t set to pay automatically, given the vast volume of emails I receive.

For my part, however, my real dislike of paperless billing comes from the fact that it is not actually the equivalent of a physical bill. For almost any company that does paperless, you don’t switch to getting a bill delivered electronically, which you can store or discard just as you would a paper bill. That was once the case early on in the introduction of electronic statements, but concerns over digital privacy have changed that. Instead, you get a generic email informing you that a statement is available. In it, there is a link. If you don’t have handy your password (and there are two whole separate sets of issues with either storing passwords or having your browser remember them), you can’t log in; the email contains no information. If you can’t locate the password or the username (or have trouble recalling which email address you used to sign up), you can’t get in. This is most commonly a problem with statements sent annually. Then, if you wait too long to log in — as may be the case for information you require only periodically — the link in the email may be dead. Moreover, many websites make it very difficult to go back archivally more than twelve to 18 months, so where paper statements can help you dig up information such as when you purchased a particular appliance or home improvement, or when you received a payment or credit, the paperless system leaves the consumer with less access to older information than paper provides.

So long as basic principles of disclosure and consent are followed, there’s no reason for the government to get in the way of paperless statements, but it’s still something I avoid whenever possible. And its drawbacks should caution against regulatory pressure to mandate it.