Are you sure you can't? Besides the paper statements, I can download my transaction data in a variety of formats including CSV from every bank I've use in the Netherlands.
The problem is that for a lot of banks there is no easy way to automate that process. I think 90 percent of use cases would be addressed simply by providing a way of giving automated read only access to statements.
Well, that was just an example for the sake of an analogy?
Obviously, I want a fully machine-readable API to all of my bank's functionality. Which also "downloading transaction data as CSV" does not fit at all if I have to manually log in and download the data. Also, CSV lists of transactions usually are useless for synchronization as they usually don't provide any mechanism to reliably deduplicate transactions and to check for completeness.
