Legal right to ask for someone bank records UK
You might want to head on over to https://law.stackexchange.com/ and ask the same question.   However from a personal finance perspective this kind of drama is somewhat common when someone is deceased and financial expectations are not met by the heirs.  It sounds like the daughter was expecting a lot more in inheritance than was actually received.  There was probably an overestimation of dad's net worth and an underestimation of the cost of his care toward the end of his life. Its best not to participate in this drama, and I feel that you are correct that the daughter does not have a right to see the bank account statements prior to dad's passage.  The question is also if she has a right to see it now. Here in the US a joint account can be setup so the ownership transfers to other account holder(s) up death of an owner.  So in this case your mother would own the account.  If the account is setup as such, then the estate has no right to that money.  You may want to check with the bank for some free advice.  What is the classification of the account now that dad has passed?  When a person grants someone else the power of attorney they have the ability to act as if they were that person.  Most of the time POAs are limited in scope so If I give a person the POA to register a car in my name, they cannot apply for a credit card in my name (legally).  In this case, however, the POA was probably general so pretty much your mom could do whatever she pleased. So if your mom took good care of the dad and bought herself some nice jewelry that is perfectly allowable with a general POA. I strongly doubt this daughter has any rights to the past records and may not even have the rights to the joint bank account currently.
If you can provide evidence that you are the person who opened the account (which may be as simple as providing your signature, since this isn't really different from asking for a bank check or inter-bank transfer or ATM-network transfer), there should be no problem. Contact your bank and ask them what information they need to provide. I have never had a lender ask my budget, only my income, savings, credit rating and value of the collateral. That's considered adequate info to estimate risk for most ordinary loans. Yes, they may want the income proven by evidence from your employer or via a copy of your tax returns. They don't care what you buy as long as there's evidence you'll make loan payments on time for the life of the loan. "Yes, your privacy is invaded, that's the law in many jurisdictions. The goal is to make money laundering and financing Evil Things harder. That's why banks are required to request proof for every money transfer larger than a specific sum. This is only a minor issue most of the time. You will have some kind of agreement with that Money Management company and this agreement (or a copy of it) will serve as a proof of your lawful reason to transfer money. It works just like that - you get to the bank and say you want to initiate a money transfer, the clerk asks you to show the ""proof"", you give them your agreement or a bill that requests you to pay or whatever else document you may have that proves that you're bound by some kind of contract with the recipient of money. The clerk then makes a copy of the ""proof"" and it stays in the bank to back the transfer until it is completed. The copy is then stored for some time and later destroyed - that's up to how the bank handles documents." Any person at any time may produce their own currency, one can even do so on the back of a paper napkin, ripped beer coaster or whatever.  This is NOT a banking privilege, it is within the lawful ability of anyone capable of engaging in commerce. It is called a 'negotiable instrument' ... it gives the holder rights to a sum of money.  Notice that I say 'holder' ... this is what distinguishes it from a non-negotiable instrument, the fact that you don't need to redeem it from source, you can pass it to another who then becomes the 'holder in due course' and thus obtains the rights conferred. The conferable rights over a sum of money (or, indeed, other asset) are themselves 'value' Do banks do this ?  Yes, all the time! ... one of the simplest examples are cheques drawn against the bank, which are considered 'as good as cash'.  Usually they will be drawn out to the order of the person you wish to pay ... but can equally be drawn out to bearer.  The only reasons they resist making out to bearer is : But you can write your own at 'any time' on 'any thing' ... See the apocryphal, yet deliciously entertaining, tale of the 'negotiable cow' It appears all you have to do is submit a form. It might be better if she submitted it herself instead of you doing it on her behalf.  All natural persons (individuals) and non-natural persons (businesses)   are entitled to access and inspect the data held on record about them   in the Central Credit Information System (KHR). "I would say a lot of the answers here aren't quite right. The main issue here is that banking is a highly oligopolous industry - there are few key players (the UK, for example, has only 5 major banks operating under a variety of brands: it's all the same companies underneath) and the market is very, very hard to enter owing to the immense regulatory burden. Because the landscape is so narrow and it's possible to keep close tabs on all  your competitors, there's no incentive to spend money on shiny new things to keep up with the competition - the industry is purely reactive.  If nobody else has an awesome, feature-filled online portal, there's no need for any one bank to make one.  If everybody is reactive, and nobody proactive, then it's a short logical deduction that improvements happen at a glacial pace. Also take into account that when you've got this toxic ""bare-minimum"" form of competition, the question for these people soon turns to ""what can we get away with?"" which results in things like subpar online portals with as much information as you like delivered on paper for a hefty charge, and extortionate, price fixed administrative fees.  Furthermore your transaction history is super valuable information.  There are one or two highly profitable companies who collate international transaction data and whose sole job in life is to restrict access to that information to the highest bidders.  Your transaction history is an asset in a multibillion dollar per year industry, and as such it is not surprising that banks don't want to give it out for free." &gt; Next time you call your bank (or credit card company), ask them some pointed questions: Do you have a financial or data sharing agreement with Equifax? If so, why?       Next time you are deciding WHICH bank to use, preferably for a significant relationship (ie million dollar + loan, business relationship, etc), you ask them then.       A bank teller has no power.  If you are already a customer, they don't care.  No one gets bonuses for customer retention, bonuses are for new business.  That's when people will care about your questions. The person you're talking to is probably someone in the company. They need to convey the message to their bank. So you need to explain it to them as if they were 3 year old kids. You may be used to SWIFT transactions because that's how you always get paid, but unless the UK firm regularly employes Russian freelancers, this is probably the first time ever they have heard of it. Similarly, someone in the local branch of their community bank has probably never heard of it before either. In Europe they use IBANs and SWIFTs are rather uncommon. Be patient, explain the issue and the solution in as many words as you can, and suggest them putting you on speaker at the bank so that you could talk directly to the person executing the transaction. If you do the same on your side and let the bankers talk directly to each other - that would probably be ideal. "There is no ""should"", but I am strongly of the view that if you have savings of several months' salary or more, they should not only be in a separate account, but with a separate financial institution, or even split between two others. A fraction of a percent of extra interest is scant reward for massively increased personal risk.  The reason for this is buried in the T&Cs. There is almost always a ""right of set off"": if one account is overdrawn, the bank reserves the right to take money from your other accounts. Which sounds fair enough, until you consider the imbalance of power. Maybe your salary account gets hacked? Maybe that's the bank's fault? Maybe the bank has made an accounting error? Maybe the bank has gone bust? Maybe you need to employ a lawyer to act on your behalf? Oh dear, you no longer have any savings. (*) This cannot happen if your savings are with a completely separate institution. Then, the only way that the salary account bank can touch your savings is by winning in the courts. If you split the savings two ways, you have also given yourself the reassurance that in the worst case only half your savings have been affected. ""Don't put all your eggs in one basket"" is proverbial. And there's a folk song that's lodged in my memory...  ""As through this world I wander, I've met all kinds of funny men. Some rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen. Yet as far as I have wandered, as far as I have roamed, I've never seen an outlaw drive a family from their home"".  I've never been in this sort of trouble and the UK's laws tend to favour the banks' customers. I don't even hate bankers. Yet even so, why take this risk when it can so easily be reduced? (*) If this sounds far-fetched, read the news, for example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/feb/02/hbos-manager-and-other-city-financiers-jailed-over-245m-loans-scam" "There will be no police involved. The police do not care. Only the feds care, and they only care about large amounts (over $100,000). What will happen is that the teller will deposit the money like nothing is unusual, but the amount will trigger a ""Suspicious Transaction Report"" to be filed by the bank. This information goes to the US Treasury and is then circulated by the Treasury to basically every agency in the government: the Department of Defense, the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, the DEA, the IRS, etc. What happens next depends on your relationship with your bank and the personality of the bank. In my case I have made large cash transactions at two different banks, one that I had a long relationship with, and another that I had a long-standing but dormant account. The long-term one was a high end savings bank in a city. The dormant one was one of those bozo retail banks (think ""Citizens"" or ""Bank of America"") in a suburb. The long-term bank ignored my first deposit, but after I made some more including one over $50,000 in cash they summoned me via a letter. I went in, talked to the branch manager and explained why I was making the deposits. He said ""That sounds plausible."" and that was the end of the interview. It is unlikely that they transferred the information. They probably just wrote it down. They did this because they have ""know your customer"" regulations and they wanted to be able to prove that they did ""due diligence"" in case anybody asked about it later. The suburban bank never asked any questions, but they did file the STRs. In general, there is no way to know if the bank will interview you or not. It depends on a lot of different factors. The basic factors are: how much money is it, are you doing a lot of business normally, and how well does the bank know you. If you refuse to answer the bank's questions to their satisfaction, it is a 100% chance that they will close your account. They can also file higher level reports that flag your activity as ""highly suspicious"" as opposed to just the normal ""suspicious"". As long as it is a bank employee, you should have no serious concerns unless the guy seems strange and asks really pointed questions. If you have any question whether the ""employee"" is legitimate, just verify that he/she is a bank employee. Obviously if the feds visit you, you should say nothing. The chance of this happening is 1 in a million." Hate to burst your bubble OP, but the average banker has ZERO control over corporate's relationship with equifax. It's silly to suggest that demanding those answers from your bottom-of-the-corporate-ladder teller or financial advisor is going to warrant you any real answers. Source: am banker. "I don't think there is a law against it. For example comdirect offers multi banking so you can access your accounts from other banks through the comdirect website. My guess would be: Germans are very conservative when it comes to their money (preferring cash above cards, using ""safe"" low interest saving accounts instead of stocks) so there just might be no market for such a tool. There are desktop apps with bank syncing that offer different levels of personal finance management. Some I know are MoneyMoney, outbank, numbrs, GNUCash and StarMoney." "There is no doubt that this is a scam (you ask a British solicitor for help with this sort of problem, not an American friend) but it's not as obvious as some answers seem to assume. Inheritance taxes always have to be paid before legacies can be received, and the funds are part of the estate not ""in the hands of the government"". There are certainly ways round the problem (which vary by country), but if the facts were as the asker sets out, this would be a reasonable request. You can bet they aren't and it isn't." I can ONLY WISH this would happen to me.  Get every scrap of information that you can. DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT..and then get a nice sleazy lawyer to sue the collector AND your employer if they leaked anything... Plain and simple,  it's illegal and there are very nice protections in place for such. Most likely this is connected with new banking regulations related to the Patriot Act, which require banks to be much more inquisitive about their customers and their money. The requirements are mostly about new accounts, but there may be some provisions to backfill this information for existing accounts.