Went back to the bank yesterday to complete the estate-related account-opening tasks before me, and couldn’t believe the gal helping me was told by some back-office document people to send a specifically-worded note to them – not by email but by fax.
The surprise wasn’t that the bank still relies on this older medium from time to time – I’ve been writing about this for quite a long while (see this post from 2012, and this one from earlier this year). Rather, I was stunned to learn that the bank requires fax for some of its internal communications.
You would think that email would be the preferred medium to use in such a case given the end-to-end control the bank has over its infrastructure and the protection thereof. OK, maybe the faxing takes place over an internal VoIP connection and is similarly well secured. Why then give up the down-the-road process efficiencies associated with a “born digital” document?
I don’t have a good answer for this, and the people yesterday were neither the right people to ask about it nor paying clients, so I simply went along. And in the end, the process worked, and I got done what I needed to do.
But I can’t help but think this accomplishment was achieved in spite of some of the information governance decisions the bank made, not because of them.
What say you?