WASHINGTON - Expecting to save up to 40% on record storage and retrieval costs, Bank of Boston Corp. recently hired a major document management firm to safeguard its paperwork.
Under the five-year $5 million contract Boston-based Iron Mountain will house the bank's 200,000 boxes of paper records in a storage facility in Franklin, Mass. - one of 65 it runs across the country.
"This is going to make us much more efficient," said Joe V. Marzetti, director of purchasing and management services at the Bank of Boston.
"Iron Mountain's document management capabilities will give us the ability to manage our expenses and monitor our record storage process," he added.
All of the bank's documents will be inventoried and tracked by Iron Mountain's computerized records management system, Safekeeper, with which the bank can make on-line requests for documents.
"A system user at the bank can initiate a request from his or her desk and the records will be delivered in as little as two hours," said Ken Rubin, Iron Mountain's vice president of marketing.
The system will also make it easier for Bank of Boston to comply with record retention laws.
Banks and other companies are required by law to hold on to different types of records for specified amounts of time before destroying them.
Mr. Rubin said that about one-third of documents held by banks are kept unnecessarily, and may be destroyed legally. As part of the contract, Iron Mountain will tighten up what Mr. Marzetti described as Bank of Boston's "overly cautious" records retention schedule.
