When it comes to keeping your properties safe, there are several factors to consider, including where you will place them and how much you are willing to spend for their protection.
Certainly, you can hide your belongings in places like beneath your mattress with all the money you’ve been saving. Nonetheless, that is probably not a good idea.
Consider renting a safe deposit box from a local financial institution. Safe deposit boxes are still in demand, even if they aren’t as popular as they once were. In the United States, there are over 25 million safe deposit boxes, or one for every thirteen people. These boxes are used by bank clients to keep a range of personal goods and valuables safe.
If your financial institution wants to provide this traditional service to its consumers, you must adopt procedures that safeguard both yourself and your customers. Keep the ten factors we will discuss here in mind when you design or revise your safe deposit box procedures.
How Safe Deposit Boxes Function
A safe deposit box is an independently protected container, often a metal box located in a federally insured bank or credit union’s vault. These are one of several non-banking services that your organization may provide.
Safe Deposit Box Rates – Rent a safe deposit box to safeguard your valuables, essential papers, and personal treasures.
When you rent one, the bank provides you with a key. You should keep this key in a safe location because if you lose it, the bank will have to charge you to replace the lock. This key is used in conjunction with a guard key kept by the bank; however, if your bank has a keyless system, you will scan your finger or enter your PIN.
Facts about Safe Deposit Boxes
- Banks have a clear process for dealing with the death of a box owner. In most cases, state law dictates what happens when a box owner dies.
You should ensure that your locker policy reflects your state’s laws. If the owner of the box dies, you can request that the name of the executor or beneficiary of the box be specified.
- Vault management tools improve security, and streamline operations. Locker management tools help staff scrutinize locker owners more closely.
When someone wants to access their box, these tools show the employee the ID of the box owner so they can compare it with the ID of the person requesting access.
Management tools can also track access logs, store leases, generate invoices, and send late notices. These tools reduce operational costs associated with lockers, and protect banks from fraud.
- The procedures for opening, and emptying safe deposit boxes are governed by state legislation. You may need to open, and empty a safe deposit box in some instances.
For example, if a tenant fails to pay their rent, and abandons the box, you may need to empty it. If you’re shutting a branch, you might have to open, and empty boxes as well.
Check with your state’s laws about this process. There are frequently quite strict rules about how you notify consumers, inventory the package, and handle its contents. You must grasp these laws in order to protect your bank from responsibility.
- Home safes are not as secure as safe deposit boxes. When promoting safe deposit boxes to your consumers, inform them that these boxes are safer than regular mailboxes.
- About 33,000 lockers are damaged each year due to accidents and natural disasters. But nothing is foolproof, and even banks withstand natural disasters.
On average, about 33,000 lockers are destroyed each year due to accidents or natural disasters. To give you an overview of the numbers, natural disasters affect approximately 15 million households in the United States each year.
- Bank robberies don’t usually target safe deposit boxes. One of the reasons lockers are more secure than home safes is that thieves won’t attack them.
Over the past five years, the FBI has reported more than 18,000 bank robberies, but only less than 50 of them involved safe deposit boxes.
Breaking the numbers down, there are about 4,000 bank robberies per year, and only 8-9 involve lockers. In contrast, nearly one million home burglaries occur each year. That means a home is about 250 times more likely to be robbed than a bank.
Unfortunately, there are no statistics on how many of these break-ins involve home safes, but it’s reasonable to assume that thieves will steal the most valuable items they find in the home.
- Banks can offer different levels of liability protection for safe deposit boxes. There is no law that requires financial institutions to insure the contents of safe deposit boxes. However, we recommend that you provide some coverage as a means of customer service.
Banks are tackling this problem in different ways. Some offer $500 liability insurance, while others offer $25,000.
Many financial institutions base their coverage on annual box rentals. For example, you can cover up to 10 times your annual box rental.
- While the bank might not legally be required to provide liability protection to your customers, you should find a way to protect the contents of your locker. This is important from a customer service perspective.
This can improve the customer’s journey and increase satisfaction with the bank. In particular, consider advising your customers to contact their home insurance company. The customer does not keep these items at home, but they may be covered by home insurance. However, customers should not assume that the box is covered.
- You should contact your insurance company directly. This is especially important for high value items that may require additional policies that increase property insurance for certain items.
- Customers can be prohibited from storing cash in lockers. Storing cash in a safe deposit box is neither safe nor financially viable. In the worst-case scenario, if the financial institution goes bankrupt, FDIC insurance will cover the cash in the customer’s account, but not the cash in the safe deposit box.
Plus, like the cash under your mattress, the cash in your safe deposit box will never beat inflation. By storing money in this way, customers lose value. To protect the customer from loss, you may want to prevent the customer from storing cash in the box. All you have to do is include
this regulation is in your locker contract.
Conclusion
You can only access your safety deposit box during business hours, which means you won’t be able to use it on holidays or, in certain situations, weekends. Keep stuff that you know you will not need in an emergency. Passports, medical directives, copies of wills and powers of attorney, and other important papers should be kept in a secure location at home, such as a fireproof home safe fastened to the floor or wall.
Private Vaults Australia offers premium bullion bar storage, jewellery storage, gold and silver bullion storage in Brisbane, Sunshine Coast & across Australia.