Safe deposit box insurance
Cover for the contents of a box rented at a bank, which the bank does not know and answers for only up to the cap in its rental agreement, the proof of contents staying with the box holder.
Over the 2015 Easter weekend, burglars drilled through the vault wall of the Hatton Garden Safe Deposit in London and emptied more than seventy boxes. Every box holder then asked the same question: who pays, and on what proof? Whoever rents out a box, a bank or a specialist company, does not know what it holds. The rental agreement says so plainly: it provides a compartment and controls access to it, it does not take a deposit whose value it would know. Its liability, when a failure of supervision is proven, is therefore capped by the contract, often at a flat amount per box far below what clients put inside. Above that, the box holder carries the risk, unless he has insured it himself. Two routes exist. An extension of the homeowners policy or of a private collection policy to objects kept in a box, often at a reduced rate since a vault beats a drawer. Or a specific cover, offered by some banks or by the specie market. In both cases the claim runs into proof: the box holder has to establish what the box contained, with invoices, photographs, a dated inventory or appraisal certificates. A box full of undeclared cash or family jewelry without papers is hard to recover on. For the vault operator's underwriter, the box room is pure accumulation: hundreds of compartments in a single room, one breach. Not to be confused with a bank deposit, where the bank receives funds or securities it has to return, nor with cash in transit insurance, which covers valuables on the move.
Dated case: in July 1976, over a long weekend, a crew organized by Albert Spaggiari entered the vault room of the Société Générale branch in Nice through the sewers and opened several hundred boxes. Box holders found that the bank answered for their losses only within the limits of its agreement, and many were never able to prove what their box had held. The exact haul was never established.
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