A JAMES Bond-style vault has opened in Belfast city centre to store cash and family heirlooms.
Vaults Group, which is the UK and Ireland’s largest private independent safe deposit box provider, has launched the facility at 20 Adelaide Street in what is a £1 million investment creating 10 jobs.
It's the first privately-owned safe deposit box site in Belfast and features cutting edge security and state-of-the-art technology.
And Belfast Vaults is already attracting huge customer interest, with dozens of boxes having already been rented by private customers and businesses.
The site has hundreds of safe deposit boxes of various sizes and capacity to expand to several thousand boxes, and they can be rented from £200 a year, less than £4 a week.
The Vaults Group business has been created by Irish entrepreneurs Séamus Fahy and David Walsh, who identified a gap in the market left by the closure of most bank safe deposit businesses.
An unparalleled security system, 24-hour monitoring, seismic shock sensors, fog cloak system, and biometric identification technology provides customers at Belfast Vaults with complete peace of mind and confidentiality, with box access limited to only the authorised person.
As well as jewellery and family heirlooms, the boxes are often used to store currency, gold and silver bullion, watch collections, important documents such as title deeds, leases and wills, or items of sentimental value which are irreplaceable.
Interest is also being driven by the rise of portable assets such as luxury watches and to store crypto-currency. They are also increasingly being used by businesses concerned about the risk of hacking, to store back-up data on memory sticks and computer hard drives.
Belfast Vaults sister company Belfast Bullion - a specialist precious metals dealer where customers can buy and sell physical gold and silver bars and coins - will also operate from the same facility.
Séamus Fahy, co-founder and chief executive of The Vaults Group and co-owner of Belfast Vaults said: “We’re looking forward to providing a much-needed service for customers across Northern Ireland, that will ultimately give peace of mind to people who require a safe haven for their valuable and irreplaceable possessions.
“Cost-cutting measures at high street banks means that secure storage has largely been phased out with customers being left with nowhere to store their treasured items.”
He added: “Our customer base is extremely varied – it is not just high net worth individuals. We have younger people wanting to store their crypto-currency and regularly converting their savings into gold, older people safeguarding their family heirlooms and increasingly, businesses choosing to store irreplaceable data.”
