The Virtual Safe Deposit Box is Born

Imagine not having to drive to the bank to retrieve a document from your safe-deposit box.

The dream becomes a reality with a deal announced today by FreeDrive Inc. and New Century Bank in Chicago. They hope to make time-saving convenience possible by providing bank customers with private, secure storage space on the Internet for their files.

“New Century Bank wants to provide the best technological offerings, and we are the first bank to offer Internet storage space to our customers,” said Faye T. Pantazelos, its president and CEO. “This really is a virtual safe-deposit box that allows customers to securely store and share files in their own private Internet storage space.”

For a fee, customers will receive 50 megabytes of Internet storage space in which they can quickly and easily store and share any business, legal, personal or school files. Customers who wish to share files with others–family, friends, clients, vendors, off-site employees or shareholders–simply provide them a password that allows authorized persons to download and share the files.

“As the demand for Internet storage grows, financial institutions will need to provide extra storage space to their employees, customers and suppliers,” said Dave Falter, FreeDrive’s president and chief operating officer. “FreeDrive is poised to be the premier provider of Web-based storage applications and services, and partnerships with financial institutions like New Century Bank are a logical extension of our business-to-business offering,” he said.

FreeDrive provides such B2B offerings to some of the country’s largest businesses and employers, including Electronic Data Services, Motorola, Britannica, and Kodak.FreeDrive makes it easy for businesses to offer their employees, customers and suppliers secure Internet storage space.

Web content, text files, spreadsheets, databases, photos and MP3 files can be quickly and securely stored on a user’s FreeDrive and accessed or shared from any wired or wireless device with an Internet connection.

FreeDrive has more then 11 million users, and its user base is growing at a rate of more than 30,000 per day.

Randy Scasny writes for Chicago.internet.com, part of the internet.com news network.