Banking giant Barclays has launched an online document store for customers that want to upload receipts, bills and passports to the cloud in order to make them easier to manage.
The Barclays Cloud It service is being offered to the bank’s personal, premier and business customers free of charge, and is accessible now through its online banking facilities.
The cloud-based storage service allows users to upload and tag important documents, which the company claims will make them easier to organise and search through.
The service is compatible with JPEG, JFIF, GIF, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PDF, DOC, DOCX, TXT, ODT and RTF file types that are up to 5MB in size.
Service users can also set up email and SMS text alerts to let them know when certain documents, such as MOT certificates and passports, need renewing.
At present there is no limit on the number of documents users can upload to their cloud, but the banking firm said it has not ruled out imposing storage capacity limits in future.
Documents can be stored in Cloud It for as long as people remain Barclays customers, but they will need to download their files before switching to an alternative provider.
The documents will be stored alongside users’ bank statements and account summaries in the online document repository.
“For customers, it eliminates the usual fumbling around through piles of paperwork when trying to find important information fast,” Barclays said, in a statement.
The company has also outlined plans to integrate its cloud-based storage service with its mobile banking app, and stressed any documents saved to its servers will not be shared with any third parties unless the company is required to by law.
Ashok Vaswani, CEO of retail and business banking at Barclays, said the company is keen to hear what customers make of the new service.
“Barclays Cloud It is about making our customers' lives easier and creating innovations that allow them to spend less time on banking and more time doing the things that really matter,” Vaswani said.
“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,” Vaswani added.
Barclays is one of a number of banks that is pushing customers to shun paper-based statements in favour of PDF or online documents, for environmental, cost and convenience reasons.
