Barclays Offers Free Document Hosting Service To Online Banking Customers

Barclays has enhanced its online banking service with ‘Cloud It’ – a free platform that allows customers to store and manage an unlimited amount of documents in the cloud.

Since Wednesday, ‘Cloud It’ has been available to all personal, premier or business customers who have already enabled online banking.

Barclays is the first bank in the UK to offer such service, only marginally related to its core financial business. Its name implies a connection with another recently launched product, Ping It – the bank’s tool for mobile money transfer.

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In a recent poll conducted by Barclays, over 50 percent of customers said they would like to see functionality of their online banking extended.

In response, the bank, which deployed the world’s first cash machine in 1967, developed Cloud It – a simple document hosting service integrated into its online infrastructure.

Cloud It allows customers to upload documents such as bills and receipts, use custom tags to organise paperwork, and even add email or SMS alerts to avoid missing important dates. All documents sent by the bank, including statements and summaries, will also be duplicated in Cloud It.

The hosting service can only be accessed after logging into online banking, which means tougher security. Besides several passwords, Barclays also equips most of its personal bank account holders with PINsentry – its two-factor authentication key generator.

The bank promises not to share customers’ documents with anyone, use the information for marketing or advertising purposes, or pass them on to a third party.

“We all have so many bits of paper, documents and files floating around these days that it often feels like we need an extra spare room to house them all. And chances are when you need to get hold of a document at the office, you will have filed it at home somewhere – if you can remember where you put it in the first place,” said Ashok Vaswani, chief executive of Barclays Retails and Business Banking.

“We are really keen to hear what our customers think about the service. We already have plans underway to integrate Barclays Cloud It with our Mobile Banking app and there is far more it could do if our customers tell us they want additional functionality.”

Barclays has not told anyone whether it is actually managing the cloud on its own It infrastructure or – as seems more likely – building it on another provider’s public cloud.

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