There is no shared standard. Every bank picks its own layout, its own date format, its own file type — and expects you to figure it out.
One bank puts debit and credit in separate columns. Another uses a single signed amount column. A third splits the running balance across two rows for multi-line descriptions.
DD/MM/YYYY, MM-DD-YY, "14 Jan 2025", Excel serial date numbers — often inconsistently within the same statement.
PDF, Excel, CSV — and PDFs split further into text-based, table-based, and scanned image-based, each needing different extraction logic.
Many banks encrypt statement PDFs with your date of birth or PAN as the password — an extra step before the file can even be read.
A dedicated parser per bank and account type — 90+ institutions tracked, with new formats typically added within hours of a sample upload — normalizes every statement into the same transaction schema, regardless of source format.