One of the largest custodian banks in the world identified the need in the UK to review its offsite corporate inventory of 340k boxes of hardcopy records. It embarked on a multi-year program to review every box held by Crown in the UK to ensure we could clearly define:
- box ownership by the respective Line of Business
- accurate and meaningful box contents details
- appropriate date ranges for the records in each box
- legal hold impacts
- the relevant Records Class Code per box
- a review date for destruction for every container
With approval from the UK Branch Executive to proceed, we involved multiple businesses across the UK in our various office locations.
Crown were closely involved from the outset as the bank had a dependency on our supplier to provide a download of the entire inventory from RSWeb. We needed to see the information contained in every available cell in the portal to help support the required advanced research. After our analysis was complete, the bank confirmed that:
- approximately a quarter of our UK boxes were deemed out-of-scope as their inventory details were complete
- the remainder would need business review, possibly involving manual lifting of the lid of each box, to enhance the corporate inventory details.
With this scoping information known, the bank informed Crown of their needs and a dedicated Project Manager was assigned to help support the program. Apart from the Lines of Business assigning accountable leads and project support staff from their own ranks, the Crown Project Manager was pivotal to ensuring adequate support was provided from the vendor’s organisation.
The Project Manager liaised with all Crown Branch Managers across the UK to provide a network of the bank dedicated box review facilities at most Crown sites. At our Bow site, Crown went above and beyond to hire two portacabins so that in the better weather months, our lift the lid reviews could continue at a secure Crown facility with our support staff close at hand.
The bank in turn would provide an advanced schedule of boxes for review, their Line of Business ownership so that records could still be quarantined to applicable staff, and individual bank staff details so that Crown could issue in advance the required ID passes and conduct their own security protocols.
Overall, the project was split into two phases – the first to focus on most UK business boxes, and the second to concentrate on boxes related to our Asset Management businesses.
Once all in-scope boxes were fully remediated, our businesses helped the firm to identify approximately 201k boxes which were eligible for destruction. Crown’s Project Manager helped the bank to develop a monthly schedule of approved bulk box destructions to dispose of the 201k cartons as soon as logistically possible.
Crown connected the bank with the 4th party destruction agent, The Shredding Alliance, to give us comfort that our boxes would be shredded via a trusted partner. We were even invited to the TSA’s facility in Peterborough twice, the first for a site review before the destruction phase commenced and the second instance was to witness a bulk shredding exercise of the banks’ boxes approved for disposal. Both Crown and the TSA provided great reassurance that the clients’ boxes would continue to be kept secure right through to the end of their lifecycle.
The success of the bank’s UK remediation project could not have been achieved without the expertise of Crown’s Project Managers, the various Crown Site Managers, and all involved Crown staff.
EMEA Regional Manager, Global Custodian Bank
