Are you doing all you can to be a trusted financial partner?

Consumers have long turned to credit unions and community banks as safe havens for their financial assets – secure, sound and government-insured repositories for their money and investments. But what about other important “assets” – items like wills, insurance policies, tax records and family photos? Losing access to these documents can be detrimental, both emotionally and legally.

Have you considered positioning your credit union or bank as a trusted partner in keeping these documents secure, and available? When you think about it, there’s no better place for members and customers to store their important items than in the highly protected online document library of their own financial institution.

Online safe deposit boxes can be conveniently accessed, are inexpensive to provide and bring great peace of mind. At DigitalMailer, our clients tell us our service, My Virtual StrongBox, is more appropriate for today’s digital world than the traditional safe deposit box. Although consumers can find other places to store gigabytes of files for free, most don’t offer the total information privacy needed for securing critical personal and financial documents online. Best-practice online storage programs combine the positive characteristics of traditional safe deposit boxes with protected cloud-based storage and sync tools designed to meet high demands for security and ownership.

Sounds like a job well-suited for your institution.

Think about the enormous volume of digital data compiled by every consumer – and if that data were lost, stolen or destroyed, how difficult would it be to secure copies, assuming they can be reproduced. Ask those who have suffered significant property loss or theft, and they’ll tell you that they wish they had done a better job of securing their valuable papers and personal items.

Providing online document storage offers a great opportunity for credit unions and banks. But the real benefit is not providing large amounts of storage to members for little or no cost (the Internet is filled with companies doing that). Rather, it’s providing members the realistic amount of storage they need through the highly secure and protected online system already in place at your institution. By doing so, you help consumers avoid the risks associated with housing their private and personal documents in the cloud’s “public domain” – or worse, not backing up these documents at all.

More importantly, a well-designed storage product can serve to promote your own business objectives; namely, leveraging your online delivery channels with members. That’s a big benefit – and one of the reasons we’re seeing a growing number of credit unions and banks step up to offer online safe deposit boxes.

Ready to give it a try? To offer your members the best quality and reassurance, make sure your online storage provider includes the following features:

• Multi-factor security, with encrypted uploads and redundant servers
• Self-storage and self-customization user features
• Increased storage limits, as needed
• Integration with existing technologies
• Mobile capabilities

As our world becomes more tech-driven, the need for safe, secure document storage increases, too. After all, it takes just one disaster, accident or unplanned loss to demonstrate how critical safekeeping personal papers and records can be … and too often, that’s too late.