Sanjay Gupta, Bank of America e-commerce executive, says more customers are going online for service needs, such as ordering new products, transferring money and checking balances. About 43% of customers now contact the bank online, he says, compared to 34% through branches and 23% by phone.

The number of subscribers increased from 4.7 million at the beginning of 2003 to 8 million in March 2004. The number of people paying bills online grew from 1.8 million to 3.8 million during the same period.

With Bank of America and Fleet combined, the organisation is adding more than 350,000 new active subscribers and 150,000 new bill payers every month. More than 47% of Bank of America's current account households actively bank online - up from 35% a year ago.

Separately, Bank of America Global Treasury Services (GTS) has announced the development of a centralised, full recovery site for its Image Lockbox services. The first of its kind, the site is designed to resume clients' lockbox business in the event of a long-term outage in one of the bank's core image sites: Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles or St. Louis.

The system utilises a new streaming technology that allows for multiple intra-day downloads of data and images to one central repository. The site is also equipped with servers that will house both processing and output specifications for clients processed at all core sites.

The facility was built out to accommodate 150% of the bank's current largest site capacity and is equipped with 195 fully functionally workstations (both hardware and software) and a mail sorter capable of sorting 32,000 items per hour.