Backup your Insurance Documents

I was chatting to a major financial institution this week about the possibility of offering an online backup service to their client base. I was actually quite interested in the strategic reasons about why they would want to offer an online backup service at all.

The answer was really quite obvious.  In addition to offering additional value added services, they saw that over time customers were gradually moving away from Safety Deposit Boxes, or more so looking for alternatives that would provide security for their key documents, in particular their Insurance documentation.

This was obviously music to my ears, but it also showed me that some banks were looking at their online offering in a much broader sense to the traditional transaction platform that it mainly is today.

If you think about your personal financial documentation eg tax records, property titles, share purchase records (before online trading was around), motor vehicle titles, jewellery valuations, artwork certificates etc. It’s actually a bit scary to think that if your house burnt down, most of this documentation would go with it and then what would you do.

A tip would be to have it all scanned into your PC and then have that information backed up. That would ensure that should disaster strike and you needed to show your insurance company evidence of purchases and price, you have it on hand.

I am sure real estate in a bank branch such as safety deposit boxes are a bit of a premium in this day and age. I wouldn’t even know how much they would be worth per year. The issue for most people is that they wouldn’t use them any way, and so they are left exposed.

Using a service such as Carbonite, is a cheap and easy way to backup your key documents, and it only takes a few minutes to set up.

Cloud Computing and Financial Institutions

Every financial institution I have worked for has had the same objective to move its clients to online statements and correspondence. Over time with a small incentive here and there they manage to get 20%, maybe 30% people across the line. The reason why they have never managed to convert me is because I have always feared losing it all (my financial records) when my computer inevitably crashes.

What would I do? I would need to ask for it all again and pay them (when it was free in paper form the first time).

Since joining Carbonite here in Australia, I have wondered about the opportunity to partner with a financial institution, and offer their client base a real incentive to convert to online correspondence. If the client knew that they would be protected, should the inevitable happen, then it sure would add greater weight to the argument compared to a cheap incentive such as movie tickets.

This morning I read a blog by Dr “Mostly Cloudy” Gerlich. He talks about Wells Fargo (large fin inst in US) offering its clients an online safety deposit box for their electronic records. The service is called vSafe. It isn’t a free service but you can’t expect any more from a bank. As he says, they have awoken to the idea and the opportunity.

vSafe will compete with Carbonite, in the US anyway. Over time, I hope to convince some of our financial institutions of the same thing, maybe not going it alone though, but partnering with Carbonite. Maybe it is still a little too soon as online storage still isn’t a mainstream service here (only really known by the technical world).

Stay tuned for more on this.