Major Bank Introduces Online Safe-Deposit Box

B O S T O N, Oct. 11 -- Metal safe deposit boxes have been a longtimestaple of the banking industry.

But that was last century.

With a new federal law that took effect Oct. 1 making digitallysigned documents legally binding, valuable electronic documents arenow as sure to pile up on computer hard drives as their paperpredecessors did in metal file cabinets.

It’s only natural that banks would be ready to step in and offersecure storage havens.

FleetBoston Financial Corp. on Tuesday launched an online safedeposit box system called fileTRUST, calling itself the first majorbank in the country to offer the service.

The virtual boxes are initially aimed at small business ownersand will offer 24-hour access to whatever digital information acustomer chooses to store inside them.

Regardless of whether Fleet’s system is successful, itsintroduction by the country’s eighth-largest bank could makevirtual safe deposit boxes more widely available, analysts say.

“It doesn’t take much time, once large institutions do things,to trip a domino effect,” said Richard Bell, an online bankinganalyst for TowerGroup in Needham, Mass.

Biggest, Not the First

Fleet’s fileTRUST is not unique.

Several smaller banks offer similar services, includingBankAtlantic in Florida, the online bank NetBank and Zions FirstNational Bank in Utah.

But no bank the size of Fleet, which has $181 billion inholdings, has invested as heavily in the technology, said DouglasKilgour, marketing director for safedepositbox.com. Kilgour’sAtlanta-based company sells a similar service to financialinstitutions. He said Fleet is the only bank to have built its owninternal system.

Fleet’s pilot system aims to appeal to small business owners,such as lawyers, doctors or certified public accountants, who don’twant to deal with the cost and hassle of creating computer filebackup systems — but need to protect and access valuable data.