Wells Fargo Rides into Online Storage

UPDATED: SAN FRANCISCO — When you think of computing services, Wells Fargo probably isn’t the first name to come to mind. But with vSafe, an online document storage system for both its banking customers, the banking giant has joined a host of providers in the market.

The bank, the seventh-largest in the country and one of the few banks in the U.S. that appears solvent amid the credit crisis, used a monstrous safe in its main San Francisco bank, with a door that’s almost two feet thick, as the backdrop for what it believes is the safest online storage service available.

Wells Fargo’s (NYSE: WFC) CEO John Stumpf made the announcement, touting the fact that Wells was the first bank to launch online banking in the U.S. “As soon as Al Gore invented the Internet, we got on it,” he joked to a small gathering of reporters, then added “that joke works better in a red state, doesn’t it?”

He said Wells Fargo has four channels of distribution, online, in branches, at ATMs and on the phone. Online sees more than a billion transactions per year, more than the other three combined. So the company wanted to expand its online offerings.

Wells Fargo vSafe service lets customers upload, protect, organize and access electronic copies of their documents and personal materials, such as loan and tax documents, wills, passports, birth and marriage certificates, photographs, and digital audio and video files.

“Customers said they are getting more and more electronic documents, but they were worried about the safety of the paper documents they already had,” said Jim Smith, executive vice president of Internet services at the bank.

For Wells Fargo customers, the bank can arrange to have all of their banking documents automatically sent to vSafe for safe keeping. vSafe supports any file format and lets the customer break down the materials in any way they want.

It supports any file format, since it’s just a data store, so Word documents, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, photos, or anything else can be uploaded. Smith said people even back up their iTunes libraries to it. Metatags are added to the files so customers can search by keyword.

So far, so what? It sounds the same as Carbonite, Mozy and countless other online backup services. But Wells Fargo has added some mighty strong security measures so no one social engineers a password like someone did to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020