Outsourcing the paper mountain

Tom Campbell, managing director of Iron Mountain’s Continental Europe division, talks to Future Banking about how his company helps clients by protecting and managing their information, so they can concentrate on running their businesses.

When information management services provider Iron Mountain was founded in 1951, the company converted an old iron ore mine used for growing mushrooms into a high-security underground storage bunker. The modern Iron Mountain’s business proposition now specialises in throwing light on mushrooming mountains of records about which organisations would otherwise be unaware.

Iron Mountain is the leading provider of document storage and management, securely storing over 200 million boxes of paper at 800 facilities worldwide for 235,000 clients in Europe, North America, and Latin America. ‘The problem,’ explains Tom Campbell, Iron Mountain’s Managing Director for Continental Europe, ‘is that records are viewed as a necessary evil that has to be dealt with somehow. They are not seen as an important part of an organisation’s critical data flows, which can be outsourced safely to a provider whose business focus is exclusively on their care and management.’

Banks, for instance, not only need to control their data so that they can understand their customer base and mine it for marketing and sales, there are also significant regulatory requirements that demand high levels of record-keeping integrity.

Says Campbell: ‘Basel II is adding legislative complexity, on top of which the different interpretations of EU directives mean countries have unique legislation that further adds complexity. The range of consumer protection law is a case in point, which impacts on how banks store and manage data, let alone mine it. This legislative patchwork is not static and is very difficult to keep up with. Then on top of this, for companies trading on the stock exchanges in the USA, there are the challenges of Sarbanes Oxley.’

Information overload

For big retail banks, both compliance and internal reporting involve data on activity levels in branches, profitability, risk management, loan portfolios and customer actions spread widely across branches and geographies. ‘It is an irony that digital technologies,’ says Campbell, ‘generate an awful lot of paper.’ Storing this safely along with all types of film, sound, images and digitally created information such as customer records, is what Iron Mountain does. More importantly it can do this in such a way that data can be retrieved as and when it is needed. If required, it can use its high-speed technology to scan any number of key documents. ‘We are a one-stop shop where clients can get at all that information,’ says Campbell.

Outsourcing to Iron Mountain also enables an organisation to create coherent policies and procedures for data storage and retrieval where none, or at best conflicting practices, have existed before. In the ever-tightening regulatory environment, companies have to demonstrate that such procedures and policies are in place. If regulators request records, they must be located and produced in a timely manner. This applies equally to legal actions, which have cost banks dearly in damages when documentation to rebut an action has been lost.

Just as Iron Mountain saves its customers the time and expense of caring for its records, so it can also free bank executives from processing customer response documentation that will eventually become part of their records, which Iron Mountain keeps safe.

‘If required, we can look after entire outsourced records processes such as servicing mandates queries,’ explains Campbell. ‘We identify individual mandates and fax or email them to the branch where the customer is making the enquiry, all within five minutes of the request being made.’

Finally, once an organisation has let Iron Mountain take care of its records, it can decide what it no longer needs to keep and when. This assures the company that it will be its business and not its paperwork that mushrooms.

Further information

Iron Mountain Europe
Tel: +44 800 270 270
Fax: +44 207 939 1502
Email: enquiries@ironmountain.com
Website: www.ironmountain.com