Taking Images Beyond Checks — To the Vault

A growing number of banking companies are stepping up efforts to use imaging, sometimes with technology originally developed to handle payments, to offer document management services that do not involve any financial activity.

Executives say these services are a logical extension of traditional banking products and services, notably safe deposit boxes, and are easy to cross-sell to corporate and retail customers.

Observers agree that bankers could parlay their reputations as trusted partners to become guardians of customers' valuable papers, even though moving into document management and archiving is also a move away from bankers' core mission of providing financial services.

For several years JPMorgan Chase & Co. has offered to convert documents into digital files for business customers, and this month it introduced a service designed to make it easier for people to manage their archived records online.

Joseph P. Stark, the executive director of JPMorgan Treasury Services' DocManager Solutions, said the service has dozens of clients from almost every market segment, including government agencies, large and middle-market companies, several banks, and even the Pittsburgh Steelers, which are using the archive to store football memorabilia and historical documents.

"This is an extension of the trust that we promote and sell to our clients. It is more or less a logical extension of what they are already doing with us," Mr. Stark said. "We're a cost-efficiency play, a disaster recovery play, a customer service enhancement play."

Government agencies, for instance, may need to store court documents and forms, while corporate clients store all kinds of documents, and banks use the service for signature cards, canceled checks, human resources records, and legal documents, he said.

JPMorgan's document management technology evolved from its payments applications.

Mr. Stark said that offering to store important documents is akin to "being a liquidity bank without having the receivables capability."

Digital document management is not new. But Edward Woods, a senior analyst at Celent LLC, the Boston financial research arm of Marsh & McLennan Cos.' Oliver Wyman, said that online management technology, which makes the archives easier to use and maintain, is relatively new, and that bankers are wise to stake out their claims in this market now.

Though many companies, ranging from Microsoft Corp. to Iron Mountain Inc., offer online data storage, they may lack the reputation for trust that bankers have long cultivated with their customers, he said. "There is a window of opportunity for banks to take advantage of, before some non-FI is able to market themselves as the de facto standard" for document management, Mr. Wood said.

And even though managing documents is very different from managing money, Mr. Woods said that the transition is a logical one for banking companies that already can parse documents and convert them into digital records, and for the customers who would be interested in a secure place to store such data.

"This is a perfect area" for banks "to extend a product line, as there is a win for both players," he said. "The customer can use a value-added service, and the bank gets a stickier and potentially deeper relationship, with the possibility of generating some fee income."

Wells Fargo & Co., which introduced an electronic consumer document archiving service Wednesday, is promoting its legacy of securing customers' valuables.

"We are a financial institution with 156 years of experience of storing people's most private and trusted documents," said Stephanie A. Smith, a senior vice president in the San Francisco company's Internet services group.

Wells, which is offering its vSafe service to online banking customers, claims to be the first banking company to offer such a service to consumers. Ms. Smith said customers could use the service to store copies of tax returns, financial documents, wills, trust and power of attorney documents, medical information, heirloom photographs, or even a child's drawings.

The service could be an alternative to the accordion files and shoe boxes where such documents often are stored now, and it could be far more accessible than paper records if the customer needed information about a lost passport or credit cards while traveling, she said.

Though customers typically do not think of their bank as a repository for digital files, the Wells service really is no different from the safe deposit boxes that bankers have offered for centuries, Ms. Smith said.

Consumers and businesses have many options when it comes to online data storage, she said — last month Google Inc. announced plans to test a system for storing consumers' medical records in conjunction with the Cleveland Clinic. However, Ms. Smith said many people would feel more comfortable storing such information with their bank.

Iron Mountain, of Boston, specializes in storing both digital and paper records for businesses, and John Clancy, president of its Iron Mountain Digital unit, said in an e-mail that as businesses' needs for secure online storage grow, his company is "encouraged to see companies like Wells Fargo offer customers a service that will protect their vital information."

Nav Ranajee, the vice president of health-care solutions with Fifth Third Bancorp's treasury management unit, said that financial companies are becoming more common participants in the document management market.

"Five years ago, even three years ago," nobody "would have thought of a bank as a provider of these services," he said.

Fifth Third processes documents and payments for health-care providers, such as hospitals and doctors' groups, and last month it introduced a tool to parse the paper forms they receive from insurance companies and compile the data electronically.

The Cincinnati company also provides an online portal for health-care providers to access claim and payment information, and it provides a variety of reporting tools so they can manage their records. This summer it plans to introduce a secondary billing module for contract management, Mr. Ranajee said.

"The value we're creating for them is that you now have one repository for all of this information," he said. "That's a value we bring to the table, because the data is coming to us."

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