Not to defend the banks, but in what situation could date/amount/description become personally identifiable? I guess it sort of depends on how descriptive the description field is, but if it just lists the product(s) then I don't really know how you'd ever be able to verifiably match it with a name.
An '08 paper from Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov at the University of Texas at Austin showed that, in a large dataset, the combination of a large number of transactions could be used to de-anonymize individuals.
