What is “Cold Storage” in Banking?

Cold storage in banking provides a snapshot of each day’s activity at a financial institution. Cold storage houses a variety of reports, statements, notices, and images generated by a bank’s core system as part of its nightly processing. Documents and information that are commonly held in cold storage include:

• Trial balances
• Daily non-posts
• Return check items
• New loan reports
• New account reports
• Closed reports
• Pay-off reports
• Non-accrual reports
• Images of cashed checks
• Images of deposits
• Teller transactions
• Checking statements
• Loan statements
• Employee logins to dormant accounts

Uses for Cold Storage in Banking

Typically, cold storage is tightly integrated with a financial institution’s core banking system. It offers an archival, searchable system of record and is used by bankers in various ways, such as:

• Image retrieval for frontline operations: Tellers and other deposit staff members are able to find and view processed check images to answer customer inquiries.
• Text matching and search: Bankers can use cold storage systems to find text within reports based on specific search criteria.
• Offline server mode: If a financial institution’s system goes down and tellers cannot access the core, “cold storage” provides a trial balance (usually as of the previous night) to approximate a customer’s account balance.

Document Management Resources

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