What removing a password does and does not mean
A PDF can carry two different kinds of password, and they do very different jobs. An open password — sometimes called a user password — encrypts the document, so nothing can read it until the password is supplied. A permissions password, also called an owner password, leaves the document readable by anyone but marks it as restricted from printing, copying or editing.
This tool removes the protection from a document you can already open. You supply the password, the document is decrypted in your browser, and a copy is saved without it. It is a convenience tool, not a recovery tool: it does not guess, crack or bypass anything, and if you do not know the password it cannot help you.
That distinction matters legally as well as technically. Removing protection from your own bank statement so you can merge it into an application is entirely ordinary. Attempting to strip protection from a document somebody else encrypted against you is a different act, and no tool that respects you will pretend otherwise.
Why encrypted statements are such a nuisance
Banks, insurers, telecoms and payroll providers routinely send statements encrypted with something derived from your own details — a date of birth, the last digits of an account number, a PAN or customer reference in a documented format. The intent is reasonable: if the email is intercepted, the attachment is not immediately readable.
The practical effect is that the document is locked every single time you touch it. You cannot merge it, you cannot preview it in most file browsers, many upload portals reject it outright, and every time you open it you type the same password again. For a document you need to submit somewhere, that friction is the whole problem.
Removing the password once, and then handling the resulting file carefully, is usually the right trade. Just be deliberate about where the unlocked copy goes: an unencrypted bank statement in a downloads folder that syncs to cloud storage is meaningfully less protected than the encrypted original you started with.
Why this one especially should not touch a server
Consider what an online unlock service actually receives. You hand it an encrypted document containing your financial or personal records, and then you hand it the password, in the same request. Whatever the privacy policy says, you have transmitted both the lock and the key to a third party you know nothing about.
That combination is far more sensitive than either half. It is also entirely unnecessary: decryption is a computation your own browser is perfectly capable of performing. Here the file is read locally, decrypted locally, and written back to your disk locally. The password never leaves the page, and there is no upload to regret.
If you take one habit from this page, make it that one. Any tool that asks you to upload an encrypted file together with its password is asking for more trust than the task requires.
Working out the password on a statement you were sent
Institutions rarely tell you the password outright; they describe its format in the covering email, and the description is often buried near the bottom. Common patterns in India are a PAN in lower case followed by a date of birth as DDMMYYYY, the first four letters of a surname plus a birth year, or a customer identification number.
If the covering email is gone, the format is usually documented on the institution's website under a help or FAQ page, and it is almost always the same for every customer rather than unique to you. It is worth checking there before assuming the document is lost.
Case sensitivity catches people out constantly. A PAN or a name is frequently expected in lower case even though it appears in upper case everywhere else in the letter. If a password looks correct and is rejected, trying it in a different case is usually more productive than concluding it is wrong.