Barclays is launching a new secure document management tool to help its customers keep all of their important financial documents in one place.
Barclays Cloud It allows users to upload, sort and manage all sorts of documents and to setup notifications and alerts for events, such as insurance renewals, by text and/or email. Barclays will also automatically upload any of its own documents it sends to you, including statements.
Barclays Cloud It accepts JPEG, JFIF, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, ODT and RTF documents up to 5MB. There’s currently no total limit on the number of documents you can upload, although this might change. Once uploaded, you can tag documents, such as “bill”, “electricity” etc, so that you can easily find the right one in future. There’s also a “document stream” which shows all of your uploads in chronological order.
Here’s a video of Barclays Cloud It in action:
If you have a business account, you’ll also get a separate “cloud” for those documents too. Barclays are currently only offering Cloud It to their customers, but they are suggesting in their FAQ that it could be made available to share documents with non-customers in the future.
Given the sensitive nature of the documents you could potentially upload to Barclays, security of them once sitting on Barlcays’ servers will naturally be a concern, and I’d suggest that if you’re paranoid about security then it’s probably best to steer clear of this tool.
If however you’re happy to trust these documents to banking-grade security (you’ll have to login to Barclays online banking using a PINsentry device) and you fancy being able to easily search through important documents (and not have them all stored in an overflowing shoe box), then this could be quite useful.
There is currently no integration between Cloud It and Barclays’ mobile apps, Mobile Banking and PingIt, but Barclays are hoping for this in the future, which would bring access to your documents whilst on the move.
Really interesting idea. It could be really useful – however I think I’d find it difficult to trust! Definitely not for everyone. But perhaps a great tool for businesses – it’s great that they give you a separate cloud for that, at least.