Digital Vaults have not only become increasingly popular; they’re table stakes for modern institutions and firms all thanks to their document management efficacy and the security they offer.
At their core, Digital Vaults enable firms to securely store and organize documents containing confidential corporate and client information.
For Digital Vaults built as a feature or an “add-on”, that’s exactly where the functionality and use cases both start and end—document management with an additional layer of security built in.
However, Digital Vaults built as a platform have materially evolved into must-have compliance and operations tools—so how might this impact your organization? For starters, it means there’s a good chance the Digital Vault your organization is currently using, if any at all, isn’t providing you with benefits or value beyond simple document storage. Plain and simple. This means you’re more than likely leaving time savings, money, and opportunity on the table.
Your Digital Vault should be helping your organization scale and improve productivity across all levels of the organization.
This is exactly where Multi-Tier Digital Vault solutions like FutureVault stand out from the crowd—all constituents involved—front, middle, and back-office teams, along with clients and households, gain tremendous value.
Continue reading below to learn seven (7) of the many value-differentiated benefits that Multi-Tiered Digital Vaults can provide your organization.
You can also learn about all things Digital Vaults here: Digital Vaults 101 – What is a Digital Vault?
Purposely built for multiple levels of your organization and multiple stakeholders
In our words, this is exactly what we are referring to when we describe multi-tiering.
It’s a game-changer in how firms are defining the way information assets and documents are managed across the many levels of their organization.
Each level and each role within distinct levels have a specific set of permissions and features that they can utilize to help streamline daily workflows, saving significant time and improving productivity.
Imagine the power and structure this affords your organization—from your back-office to front office advisors, relationship managers, office managers, to your clients, their network, and their families—everyone has a unique “role” and plays by their own set of rules within the Vault.
The concept of multi-tiering moves away from a one-way, inefficient, rigid document “feed” to a secure, collaborative, flexible, multi-way document exchange platform.
The question you should be asking yourself is this; does your Digital Vault provide this level of flexibility, structure, and connectivity?
Secure access to back office, front office, and client documents in one convenient location
Having centralized governance of information assets and documents ensures compliance and document management efficiency at scale across your firm—a direct result of multi-tiering.
From both a compliance and operational lens, having every piece of information accessible within one secure environment addresses several workflow challenges.
Importantly, securing your information assets within one location provides compliance teams with “evidence” that policies (such as your document retention policy) and procedures are adhered to across the entire organization and that all documents are “discoverable” for internal or external audits.
By consolidating multi-source document access into one single, centralized “Golden Source”, your entire organization will reap the benefits.
Does your Digital Vault provide you with access to all back office, front office, and client documents within one secure, centralized, convenient location?
Eliminate insecure, noncompliant, and inefficient ways of sharing and collecting information
Slow, insecure, and non-compliant—despite these three concerns, far too many firms and advisors rely on email as their primary method to distribute and receive sensitive corporate and client information.
The problem is exacerbated by legacy systems that make it easy for physical paper to find its way into internal and external processes—from new client onboarding and account transfers to training materials and policies.
Email and physical paper are not just a major cause for concern when it comes to cybersecurity and compliance, they’re inefficiencies might just be preventing your firm from scaling.
If your Digital Vault is nothing more than a “dumping ground” for corporate and client documents, then we caution you to pump the brakes. Your Digital Vault should enable your firm to move away from insecure, noncompliant, inefficient legacy systems and processes to secure, compliant, and efficient processes that can be standardized and scaled.
Here are a few, of many, ways a multi-tiered Digital Vault like FutureVault’s platform streamlines the ability to distribute and receive documents instantaneously across all levels of your organization.
Global Folders
Allow teams to populate, replace, and update documents within folders that are universally available across your organization and with clients.
Document Distribution
An easy, effective, and secure way to share resources and materials on a 1-to-1, 1-to-many, or even many-to-1 basis in real-time.
Custom Document Checklists
Streamline existing information and document gathering processes to significantly improve the way documents and information are collected and stored from internal and external sources.
How secure and efficient are your document exchange workflows?
Streamline audit readiness cycles and resources
Digital Vaults completely transform audit readiness cycles by reducing the time, effort, and resources required to prepare for and execute an audit.
This is a direct result of establishing a secure centralized repository where information assets and documents are readily available and discoverable.
With FutureVault, additional enriched features such as the ability to tag documents along with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), streamline searching for and locating specific documents.
What if you could eliminate the time-consuming back and forth audit requests for “evidence”? Well, there’s good news—you can.
In particular, FutureVault’s patented permissioning technology enables compliance teams to provide regulators and third-party auditors with direct access to their centralized repository. For auditors, this provides them with secure access to the necessary and required information needed to perform an audit—a win-win for everyone involved. Auditors also gain access to a Fiduciary Audit Trail, showing them a detailed history of all activities that take place in the Vault down to a specific document.
How comfortable and confident are you with your current audit preparation processes and the average time it takes to complete an audit?
Securely manage documents, including client statements, in bulk
If your firm is spending countless hours and resources dedicated to managing the mass number of documents, files, and client statements, just know that you’re not alone.
Managing all sorts of documents from client statements to historical corporate documents is a necessary evil from an operations and compliance lens. Unfortunately, the current methods being utilized are inefficient and result in firms not only spending far too much time managing documents but requiring them to hire roles to backfill document management capabilities.
Having a solution to help your organization manage critical data and documents in bulk isn’t just a nice tool to have, it’s an absolute must-have from a productivity and profit perspective.
Bulk upload
Save days, if not weeks of work, by automatically delivering statements to clients and advisors in bulk. When you spend less time sending statements to your clients, you can spend more time with your clients.
Bulk download
Quickly and easily download all corporate, advisor, and client documents within Vaults for safe record-keeping to manage compliance requirements and fulfill audit needs in just one simple click.
Streamline and automate new client onboarding processes
Streamlining the paperwork involved in new client processing benefits everyone—your back office, your advisors, and importantly, your clients.
The typical workflow of new client onboarding and processing involves several back-and-forth document exchanges, manually creating new accounts, and manually depositing documents on a one-by-one basis.
FutureVault’s integrated eSignature workflow enables advisors to automatically create new client Vault accounts the moment a new client agreement form is signed, while also automatically depositing eSigned documents directly into the correct folder within a Vault account—making it instantaneously accessible for clients, advisors, and back office.
This alone saves several hours of the manual administrative work involved with new client processing. Not only does this provide time and cost savings, it also helps firms meet document retention requirements by ensuring client onboarding documents remain evidenced and accessible.
Additionally, advisors and front office admins, often spend additional hours providing new clients with sufficient materials and resources as part of the onboarding experience. Global Folders, mentioned above, make it easy for firms and advisors to standardize this part of the onboarding flow by pre-populating new client Vaults with additional materials and resources that show your clients you have their best interest in mind.
Make it easy for clients to securely manage their personal documents
A secure Digital Vault like FutureVault allows individual end-users, your clients, have their own Vault accounts where they can better manage, access, and safeguard their most personal information and documents such as eye-glass prescriptions, family health records, legal documents, estate plans and wills, accounting and tax information, real estate and rental documents like tenant screening information, and of course their financial documents, naturally through their relationship with your firm.
In addition to simply storing documents, client Vaults have the inherent capability of making the information within the Vault accessible from anywhere, anytime. Imagine the power this affords your clients—they can easily get a copy of their passport during your business trip, details about their health insurance while they are on vacation, or information about their bank account and legal matters, all with a few simple clicks.
Clients can easily set reminders for documents with expiry or renewal dates – think driver’s licenses, insurance policies, mortgage agreements, you name it.
Taking it a step further, FutureVault can be utilized as a personal CRM for individuals by allowing them to create and associate contacts to different documents and pieces of information within their Vault. Insurance policy? Create and associate a contact for who was involved during that process. Eyeglass prescription? Create and associate a contact for who was involved. Kitchen renovations? Create and associate a contact who was involved at all stages of the renovation.
Your clients can have this level of structure, organization, and peace of mind all thanks to you providing them with a branded Vault, making for a smooth and seamless experience that extends beyond the immediate financial management relationship. As a result, the personal connection with your firm increases exponentially.
Does your Digital Vault enable your clients to better manage their personal lives outside of your relationship? Probably not, but it can.
Establish your competitive edge by improving compliance and operational efficiencies with FutureVault
Digital Vaults are evolving into more than a document storage interface—they’re becoming operations and compliance tools that can help financial service organizations scale and improve productivity.
If your Digital Vault does not offer your back office, front office, or your clients the material benefits listed above, then it’s time to re-evaluate the way you’re using it or the solution you’re using.
There is no time like the present to power your back, middle, and front office teams with a Digital Vault to drastically improve compliance, drive operational efficiencies, and win the hearts, minds, and wallets of your clients.
In the words of FutureVault’s trusted partners and clients; not all Digital Vaults are created equally.
