If you are wondering how much it might cost to enable long-term or lifetime archives for your customers, here's a data point from an article in today's American Banker about the pros and cons of pooling image archives with other banks.

Intrust says that it's latest 5-terabyte upgrade cost just $30,000. Doing the math, that's $6 per gig for approximately 5000 gigabytes of storage. Here's the exact quotation attributed to Jim Simon, Intrust’s VP of operations:

Last summer (Intrust) put its entire (image) archive online as a result of a five-terabyte storage system upgrade that cost just $30,000.

Analysis
At $6 per GB, storage space for online archives is already so inexpensive that it won't be long (2 to 3 years) before real-time online access to 7+ years of image/statement history is the norm in banking; and by the end of the decade, we expect most financial institutions to offer lifetime archives.

So if you want to use lifetime archives as a point of differentiation, you better move fast. You only have a one- or two-year window before it's just another me-too upgrade.

For more information:

• Previous Netbanker article which includes lengthy research notes
• Upcoming Online Banking Report to be released in early June

--JB