Headlines:
Iron Mountain Shredding Plant
The data storage company Iron Mountain Inc. has opened what it said is the world's largest document destruction facility.
The Boston company announced Thursday that its new site, in Jersey City, can shred 200 tons of paper per day and can also destroy electronic storage media, including disk drives, microfiches, CDs, and DVDs.
"Secure shredding has become an essential part of a company's compliant records management program," said Barry Payne, the senior vice president in charge of Iron Mountain's shredding operations, in a press release.
On Wednesday the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement in one of several recent cases in which a financial company's trash was used for fraud.
In April 2004, it said, a hacker broke into a title insurer's Web site using information from home loan applications it had dumped into an open trash container. The settlement was with the insurer, Nations Title Agency Inc. of Prairie Village, Kan., a unit of Nations Holding Co.
BB&T Using SVPCO Network
BB&T Corp. of Winston-Salem, N.C., has begun sending check images over The Clearing House Payments Co. LLC's SVPCO Image Payments Network.
Joseph E. Brannan, a executive vice president at BB&T, said Thursday that he expects its traffic with the other 12 banking companies that use the network to grow gradually over the next year. "I call it the stacking effect," he said. "You've got to test with each partner."
Mr. Brannan said that bankers are talking about developing a certification program to make it easier for participants to establish exchange-image capabilities with each trading partner. That will take time, though, he said. "As it stands today, it is one-off testing. Everybody has to get in line behind everybody else."
His company began sending and receiving files across the network May 5. Mr. Brannan described BB&T's status as "pilot production mode" and said that a nondisclosure agreement prevented him from naming its first trading partner.
BB&T, which stores its check images in the shared repository of Viewpointe Archive Services LLC of Charlotte, also plans to begin testing Viewpointe's image-sharing settlement system "very soon - in a matter of a few weeks," Mr. Brannan said.
It hopes to be clearing 80% of its paper check volume electronically by sometime next year, he said.
The Clearing House said participants cleared 35.2 million check images across the SVPCO network in April, up 20.6% from March. The system carried an average of 1.7 million images per day, up 38.7% from March, and the peak day was April 24, with 2.7 million images.
