Wells Fargo to Launch Online Safes
March 19, 2008 at 7:59 am by Ehab BandarGoing to your safety deposit box is generally not something you do every day, and when done, usually tinged with a sense of secrecy and privacy, approached with an almost James Bond-like precision. Well, Wells Fargo thinks it’s time these safety boxes move into the 21st century.
As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, Wells Fargo will start offering a new service called Wells Fargo vSafe that lets customers securely store and access online their bank statements and any other personal and confidential document.
Although online storage services have been around for a while, non before Wells Fargo have been built and offered by a financial institution.
The move by Wells Fargo to invest in this service is a bet that secure, online storage is the virtual equivalent of safety boxes, where customers can digitally store practically any sensitive document, from tax returns to wills. But unlike regular safety boxes, this can be accessed from anywhere. And yet like your behind the teller counter safety box, Wells Fargo vSafe offers two-factor authentication as an add-on security feature through the use of tokens that generate a one-time password. The service will also automatically store 2 years worth of bank statements.
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March 19th, 2008 at 3:18 PM
Big applause to any financial institution offering it’s customers a “paperless solution” that increases convenience and simplicity of online storage. Experts have estimated that only 15% of the 50 million plus online banking customers today have opted to switch to paperless life.
A few important considerations that are often overlooked when consumers go online and paperless include the effort required to collect documents from a range of web sites (many consumers have accounts at different institutions for banking and brokerage transactions), authentication of document originality, document security, centralized organization, secure availability of documents with a registered “investment advisor” (e.g. tax accountant) and then disaster recovery in the event of fire, flood or earthquake as illustrated with the California fires last year. Wells has chosen to address one or maybe two on this list.
As financial services consumers seek to reduce paper clutter and streamline their financial lives, the need for an easy-to-use, convenient and secure service with a flexible set of financial management tools becomes more critical. I would invite you to review a new online service recently made public last week known as VaultStreet at the web address www.VaultStreet.com to learn more.