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Crown Worldwide, a corporate information management company, plans venture into vault services for valuable documents with an investment of $8 million (₹50 crore) over the next 18 months.
The company has inaugurated the first vault service in Chennai with capacity to store 40,000 cartons. It has already received commitment for 25 per cent and expects to run out of space in eight months.
Crown plans to launch the service near its record-keeping facility in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Pune in a phased manner.
Along with a high degree of security, the vaults will be temperature-controlled to ensure quality of paper documents stored. Crown plans to charge about ₹150 a carton per month with a minimum commitment of 150 cartons per customer.
Ken Madrid, Group CEO, Crown Worldwide, said the vaulting services in India will be complementing the record-keeping business which is growing at a much faster pace and revenue from India is expected to overtake the UK in two-three years.
Globally, he said vaulting services business is about $6 million for Crown.
Compliance standards
Srinivas Krishnan, Managing Director, South Asia, Crown Worldwide, said with the RBI tightening the compliance standards the demand for document vaulting services in India is expected to come from banks and other financial service providers.
Rather than wasting energy and time on safe keeping documents, banks find it more prudent to let an expert like Crown to do the job, he added.
In fact, he said the demand for record keeping in Chennai has increased from private sector companies after the last two consecutive years of flooding in Chennai. Retrieval of document had risen to 46,000 a month from 10,000 last year alone, he said.
Though storage of documents in electronic format is growing, regulators always want to refer to the original document in case of a dispute or for authentication, said Madrid.
Started in Japan 53 years ago, Crown manages 330 million cubic feet of business record globally with Australia generating the maximum revenue of $50 million followed by the UK and India at $20 million and $12 million. It is one of the largest record keeping and corporate relocation company in India.
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