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Siftsort.com Enterprise ‘Document Vault’ Platform Sees Steady User Growth

We’ve created a fully-integrated solution which helps to securely connect clients to their financial institution.

Our enterprise document vault technology proved to be a ‘digital necessity’ during the pandemic – helping to securely connect Private Wealth Management clients to their Financial Advisors to allow them to safely share sensitive documents with bank personnel or a trusted third-party.

Daily Users activity grew at more than 2x the rate during the pandemic compared to prior to the pandemic. This digital transformation was a rocket ship of growth and scale for us and that trend continues to grow to this day.

Securely sharing files might sound ‘old hat’, but it’s more challenging in regulated environments like a bank or wealth management firm. Strict legal and compliance regulations can prohibit employees from sending and receiving files using routine desktop applications, especially with their external clients around the world.

Siftsort.com designed a highly secure platform to help close the gap on compliance and cybersecurity risk so that wealth management clients can share the files they need to with their financial advisor or a trusted third-party directly from their online wealth management portal.

When a financial institution provides a secure vault to help their clients organize their important documents in a safe place – it adds a lot of value. Especially when it’s embedded in their wealth management portal. This makes it a natural place for clients to securely store and share files with the bank or a trusted third-party such as an accountant or lawyer.

Financial firms continue to provide various digital solutions to help make it easy for their clients to interact with the bank and its personnel. And it feels good knowing that the Siftsort.com Enterprise ‘Document Vault’ is helping them make that secure connection.

Siftsort.com Sees New User Adoption Up 422%.

What we do is very relevant in the COVID world we live in. And the numbers prove it.

Siftsort helps you to securely organize and share highly-sensitive documents with family or trusted professionals. Founded by former Goldman Sachs technology executives, our goal is to provide a simple and secure way to share sensitive files.

That might sound simple. And it is to some extent. But sharing sensitive documents in regulated environments (e.g. banks, financial advisory firms, accounting firms, healthcare) is anything but simple. Large scale data breaches can cost millions of dollars in fines and ruin the reputation of the business. It’s these regulations and the potential penalties that may be incurred, which makes the simplest of tasks (sending an email) more complex.

We designed our platforms to help close the gap on compliance and cybersecurity risk so that you can share the content you need to from anywhere, even in a complex (regulated) environment.

Our retail platform

A turn-key solution designed for consumers and small or medium size businesses to seamlessly and securely share sensitive files, when needed. Ideal for personal use or for professionals; such as accountants, lawyers and financial advisors working in teams.

Our enterprise solution

A fully-integrated solution that provides clients a compliant way to organize and share important documents with their Financial Advisors or trusted third-parties, directly from any institutional client portal.

How the COVID pandemic changed the work environment and increased the compliance risk.

When the global lock down occurred, firms had make adjustments to have staff work from home. Again for most employees, managing email and voicemails from the comforts of their home wasn’t so much an issue. But, this in and of itself creates compliance risks for large institutions such as a bank or private wealth management firm. Servicing clients outside the firm, where the in-house compliance system may or may not be able to monitor employee activities raised red flags.

Employees who interact with clients on a day-to-day basis might need to share sensitive files. This sounds easy to the everyday employee. But in a regulated environment, there are restrictions in place on what types of documents can be shared and how. Large firms spend millions of dollars on infrastructure to ensure the majority of their employees have some sort of remote access to the firm. But, there are still challenges for employees who interact with clients from their home. Especially when the only client facing tool might be the company website or a client portal. An integrated secure messaging and document vault platform can help to mitigate these risks when servicing client needs.

Our solutions compliment the tools that are already in place to help professionals interact with clients in a compliant way. More professionals and clients are interacting and sharing sensitive files on our enterprise platforms which are embedded at Fortune 100 financial institutions.

422% increase of new Users in Q1-2021 vs. Q4-2020.
315% increase of new Users compared to the same period last year.
Q1-2021 had generated more new Users than all of 2020.

It should be no wonder that tax season is always busy for us with Professionals and Clients sharing sensitive files back and forth. But during the pandemic, those interactions grew exponentially. And the numbers prove it.

A 211% increase in User demand Q1-2020 vs Q4-2019

We here at SIFTSORT think that everyone has important documents that need safekeeping. The problem is that most people usually don’t think about “organizing what’s important” until uncertainty lingers, or its too late.

User demand more than doubled as COVID-19 made headlines.

As the news of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) started to spread around the world in early January 2020, we noticed a spike in overall user demand (user activation, document uploads and secure folder sharing). By February 2020, the spike was consistent and growing.

Not only did our retail site see this spike, but our enterprise solutions that we provide to banks saw it as well. People are scared. Uncertainty is not only lingering but very much staring people in the face.

Whether its your estate plan (will, trust, health-care proxy and power of attorney), deeds, mortgages or medical records for you or a loved one, we all have “stuff” that needs to be organized. As we social-distance ourselves and spend time at home in front of our computers, we recommend taking a few minutes a day to organize what’s important and securely store them in SIFTSORT so you have peace of mind.

Siftsort.com Nominated For Best New Product by Benzinga

Benzinga Unveils Fintech Innovators To Be Honored At 5th Annual Fintech Awards on November 19th, in NYC. https://fintechawards.com/

Siftsort.com is proud to be recognized for making a difference in the Fintech community.

The Benzinga Fintech Listmakers is comprised of 150 carefully vetted and renowned companies/executives who are striving to revolutionize the fintech industry.

Benzinga Global Fintech Awards Celebrating Financial Technology Companies

Siftsort Sees Steady User Growth from their Fortune 100 Clients

At Siftsort.com, we private-label solutions to institutional clients such as retail banks, trust companies and private wealth management firms to securely allow clients to store important documents and share with their professionals directly from their existing institutional portal or website.

Sounds simple and not really sexy in the Fintech world, but remember the financial services sector is a highly regulated environment, so getting simple things done takes a bit of time. Most banks have large technology departments but that doesn’t always mean that they are able to develop a solution, when one is needed. Legal and Compliance rules usually prohibit ‘risky’ technology from being developed internally. Generally firms hire vendors with expertise in a specific area to integrate a solution into the firm so they can demonstrate to regulators that a controlled approach is being adhered to, reducing the risk to the firm.

It also is a very competitive industry. It’s very easy for a client to simply take their money and move it to another bank. So firms have to offer their customers more convenient services and rewards to help retain that loyalty. But creating the new app that is ‘highly-sticky’ is always a challenge. Here at Siftsort, we take a different approach to help out.

We aim to solve a very simple problem that helps create loyalty and stickiness. By helping clients securely view and share documents with their financial advisor, we in-turn, help the bank to service their clients in a compliant way. Ultimately helping the firm create ‘stickiness’ and build a deeper relationship between the client and the organization.

Siftsort.com Solves a SIMPLE Use Case But Creates HUGE Value: How does a client send a 75-page document (or numerous ones) to a Financial Advisor when the firm restricts clients from emailing it and the client doesn’t want to send it in the mail? Not an easy answer in a regulated industry. Popular file-sharing platforms are not permitted inside big banks (most blocked at the firewall) and the technology departments do a good job at restricting the employees desktop capabilities to only what is needed and approved by the bank.

By allowing clients a secure portal to store whatever is important to them, with the option to securely share it with their financial profession when needed, you now create a platform of convenience that goes a long way with your client-base.

We do just that. We take our retail platform and customize it according to the institutional needs so that it is fully-integrated and seamless to the end users. Having years of experience with Legal and Compliance allows us to bring a compliant solution to the table and not just a typical cloud solution.

Generally speaking, banks don’t have storage problems, they have compliance problems. Having worked at Goldman Sachs and other financial service companies for nearly 20 years, we realize what’s needed to help solve technology challenges within a regulated industry.

About Siftsort.com – Who we are

Our Management Team.

Our founders have a combined 30 years of experience developing and implementing large scale technology projects for world-class financial services firms around the world. They have designed and built trading floors, datacenters, web applications as well as redundant backup sites for Fortune 500 companies like AXA/Equitable, Wachovia, American Express, Goldman Sachs and more.

Darren Conte founder and CEO of Siftsort.com was previously Vice President for Goldman Sachs & Co., where he worked in both the Technology and Securities Division giving him broad exposure to the operational and business side of Equities and Fixed Income and Commodities. During his Wall Street career he was involved in large-scale enterprise technology projects, trading floor expansion, build-outs and integrating external clients and target firms through M&A activity. He was a consultant to the New York Stock Exchange as the developer and primary coordinator for all business contingency plans within Goldman Sachs Securities Division which helped to certify the firm for preparedness and contingent operation as required by the SEC, after the 2001 terrorist attacks. He attended Western Connecticut State University for Business Administration and Management Information Systems in 1989.

Feel free to connect to Darren Conte on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenconte

Siva P. Misra co-founder and CTO at Siftsort.com, where he manages the design and architecture of Siftsort.com’s application and technology stack. Prior to joining Siftsort.com, Siva played a leading role in Information Technology within Goldman Sachs, where he was responsible for development and infrastructure management applications. He also played major role in the definition, planning and execution of the on-going migration of legacy financial applications to using leading edge technologies. With over fifteen years of experience in system and application integration within the financial services and telecommunication sectors, he has enterprise experience in rolling out commercial applications to global environments. Siva obtained B.S in Electrical Engineering and M.S in Computer Science from Osmania and Central Universities, India respectively.

Board Members and Advisors

Robert Hanisee, CFA, Managing Director, Trust Company of the West

Mr. Hanisee joined TCW in 1990 and has been a member of the Private Client Services Group since 1997 where he serves as Chief Investment Officer and was in charge of Asset Allocation. Prior to that, he was Director of Research and among other responsibilities was the Chairman of the Equity Policy Committee and Portfolio Manager of the Global Telecom Trust where he was responsible for conception, implementation and management. In January, 2004, Mr. Hanisee retired from his full time duties, but continues on a part time basis.

A veteran of over 45 years in the financial business, Mr. Hanisee has completed over 20 public financing’s, including IPO’s and secondary offerings, both equity and debt, and was involved in the initial round and follow-on financing of five defense and technology venture capital startups. Mr. Hanisee has continued to be involved with each through either board membership or financial consulting.

Mr. Hanisee has been involved with other boards and business related activities in space/defense and technology firms.

Mr. Hanisee holds a BA in Economics from California State University at Northridge and an MA in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.

Andrew Melnick, Managing Partner Skyview Investment Advisors

Before joining Skyview Investment Advisors, Andrew Melnick was a Managing Director of Goldman Sachs after Merrill Lynch & Co. where he was Director of the Global Securities, Economic and Fundamental Equity Research for 13 years.

A veteran of more than 30 years in the financial business, Mr. Melnick and SkyView provide alternative investment advisory services, including fund of hedge funds and “40 Act” mutual fund of hedge funds providing daily liquidity as well as customized portfolio solutions.

The firm has its roots in Riverview Alternative Investment Advisors, which was founded in 1999. Over the years, the team has developed tailored solutions to best meet the investment and operational requirements of various institutional investors.

SkyView established rigorous investment processes designed to identify the sources of risk and return on a portfolio, strategy and manager level. SkyView’s processes combined with the team’s investment and capital markets experience enable them to differentiate luck from skill when choosing hedge fund managers.

SkyView provides full transparency to its investors and incorporate key investment requirements in the investment decisions, including tax efficiency and liquidity.

Mr. Melnick holds a BA in Economics and an MBA in Finance from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in New Brunswick.

Edward L. Goldberg, Founder, Dix Hills Partners. Chairman, Longview Investments LLC

Mr. Goldberg is a founder of Dix Hills Partners, LLC and its affiliate management company, Dix Hills Associates, LLC and serves as a Senior Advisor and Managing Member of both companies. Mr. Goldberg is the Chairman of Longview Investments, LLC, a company formed to manage his personal family office and assets as well as provide advice for other family offices.

Mr. Goldberg retired from Merrill Lynch with over 42 years of dedicated service to the firm. At Merrill Lynch, he served as the Executive Vice President of the Operations Services Group, and a member of the Executive Management Committee. In this role, he had oversight responsibility for operations and client services throughout the firm’s global network of offices.

Mr. Goldberg was also Chairman of the Merrill Lynch Securities Services Division which provides integrated third-party execution, settlement, custody and financing services. He also served on the Audit & Finance Committee of the firm’s Board of Directors and was a member of the Risk Oversight Committee.

During his tenure at Merrill Lynch, Mr. Goldberg held a variety of senior level positions in sales, marketing and operations that included responsibilities for the firm’s worldwide operations, information technology, real-estate and purchasing activities; Senior Vice-President of the firm’s Professional Securities Services Group which provided financial, clearing and operational services to independent broker/dealers and; Regional Director of the Mid-East Region overseeing a sales force of 1,100 financial consultants in 39 branch offices.

Mr. Goldberg was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Depository Trust Company, a member of the New York Stock Exchange’s Financial and Operational Surveillance Committee, a member of the Board of Directors of the NASD where he served on the Disciplinary and Management Development Committees, and a member of the Board of Directors of the NASDAQ Stock Market, also serving as a member of the Executive Committee and chairman of the firm’s Finance Committee.

Mr. Goldberg is a graduate of the New York Institute of Finance.

Jay Mitchell

Jay M. Mitchell has over 35 years of advisory experience, and was the founding principal of a sector leading real estate human resources advisory and consulting practice. He has advised numerous public, private and not-for-profit entities, and a broad cross section of financial institutions in the areas of executive selection, recruitment, compensation, and competitive business strategy.

Mr. Mitchell holds a degree in psychology, serves on several advisory boards and is a current member of the board of directors of several national corporations including a national franchisor.

He has lectured on real estate, career advancement and career change at industry and university level.

Siftsort.com Obtains Patent For Highly Secure Platform Which Helps Consumers and Professionals Securely Organize, Access and Share Important Documents.

Siftsort.com Obtains Patent For Highly Secure Platform Which Helps Consumers and Professionals Securely Organize, Access and Share Important Documents.

United States Patent and Trademark Office Publishes U.S. Patent No. 9,280,670

NEW YORK, March 29, 2016 – Siftsort.com announced today that they have received a patent grant by the United States Patent and Trademark Office for their secure platform that helps people organize important documents and share them with family or trusted professionals. The USPTO published U.S. Patent No. 9,280,670 on March 8, 2016.

“We are very excited”, says Darren Conte, founder and CEO. “We have worked hard over the years to enhance our platform to make it highly secure and we are proud of the unique way that we have developed our system”, says Conte.

Siftsort makes it easy for consumers to organize and secure important documents like wills, trusts and medical records so that they can be shared when needed. Siftsort also released a professional version for small and medium size businesses to help them securely connect to clients and share files using similar technology that big enterprise firms use including secure messaging and soon to be released e-notarization functionality, included in the patent.

Siftsort for Professionals (www.siftsort.com) helps advisors, CPAs, lawyers and agents to safely organize client files in a secure web platform. Professionals can quickly and easily organize the most sensitive information within minutes and securely collaborate with clients.

Siftsort for Personal (www.siftsort.com) is a free platform that helps people organize important family documents such as identification, medical records and financial statements in their own secure vault. They can then securely share files and collaborate with family or trusted professionals.

Both platforms seamlessly connect to securely share content and collaborate without using unsecured email or third-party file sharing programs. It even audits the activity between each party.

“It’s a simple, turn-key solution that addresses the needs of any professional office. How to share sensitive information without having to worry about violating HIPAA, PCI or other privacy issues,” says Conte.

The founders are former Goldman Sachs & Co. technology executives who spent their careers developing and implementing large-scale applications that supported different areas of the firm including Equities, Fixed Income and Commodities and Global Operations. Siftsort private-labels their platforms to Fortune 100 institutions such as banks, private wealth management firms and trust companies and have been selected as the vendor of choice because they understand the highly regulated environments that these organizations operate in. “The legal and compliance hurdles are complicated but we have been recognized for our experience to securely connect external clients to an enterprise firm”, says Conte.

About Siftsort.com

Siftsort.com is an innovative software company that helps people securely organize, access and share what’s important to them. The founders have comprehensive expertise creating leading web technology and secure document management tools for the financial services sector in accordance with New York Stock Exchange, Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations.

Contact
Karine Adalian
karine.adalian@siftsort.com

Year-End Organizing: Digital Files Part II of III

Second in the series of posts on organizing for the new year.

We all have important documents that need safekeeping. The problem is that we don’t have access to these documents when we need them the most, say after a disaster, during a medical crisis, or in a travel emergency.
More than online storage, the Siftsort.com service allows households to securely organize, access, and share important family documents and records using various technology devices.
Users can access medical records, financial papers, or other family information securely over the Internet or by calling a Toll-Free Hotline.
Professionals such as doctors, accountants, and lawyers can securely view, contribute, and exchange information on behalf of the user.

While Siftsort.com is great for storing and securely sharing important documents with advisors, family and medical professionals, you certainly have digital documents that don’t need of that level of security.

As you go through your files, you may find some you need to add to your Siftsort.com account, which is free if you don’t have huge storage needs.

We do not use ‘shared’ cloud infrastructure, we use only dedicated servers and storage disks for further protection because we license our platform to financial companies, who prefer it that way.

Here are some ways to organize those non-critical documents now from Apartment Therapy:

“Everyone’s digital life and needs are different. Consider this a very basic guide on how to do a little digital cleaning and organizing of your computer in a couple of hours so you can have a system that runs a little smoother and so you can find files you need a little easier.

1. Backup now!

Before you start doing any deleting, fiddling, cleaning or sorting — backup everything important to you, whether in the cloud, by syncing with another computer or by using an external hard drive….

3. Design a file structure that works for you

There are many ways to structure the files on your computer. In fact, you can get fairly technical with this task (we like articles like this one and this one from Lifehacker). But if you’ve got all of your data files — photos, PDFs, text documents and more — cluttering your desktop, you could benefit from establishing and using a basic file structure — much like you would organize your paper files.
→ The starting point is deciding what your highest level folders are. These are the big parts of your life. From your photos, to work files, to finances to half-written sci-fi novels, these are the categories that will serve as the first portal into your digital life. (Some folks let these big folders live in “My Documents,” others stick them straight to the hard drive — just don’t put these folders on your desktop!)

→ Put all the free-floating files into the correct top level folders. Put any errant photos in the big photo folder. All taxes, bills and more in the finances folder. (Or whatever folders you’ve made for yourself).

→ Then, organize each big top level folder into smaller, more specific sub-folders, one at a time. Take it one folder at a time, and start putting files (or other folders) in an order that will make sense when you need to find them again. Consolidate existing folders so they begin to fit into your new, more organized file structure. Don’t be afraid to go deep with sub-folders. You don’t really want to have a folder with say, 1 file in it, but you don’t want to stop at folder that has like, 50 files in it. ”

New Year Organizing: Paper Part I of III

Now is a good time to go through your files and purge what you don’t need so you can start 2016 fresh. This is a first in a series of posts on organizing for the new year.

Paper files

As much as we might hate it, sometimes we need to have paper documents. As we get ready for tax season, we may have a combination of digital and paper files to work with. From Kiplinger.com a few years ago:

“As you finish up your tax return this year, take the opportunity to clean house. With a few key exceptions — mainly tax-related documents — you don’t need to keep all those papers. And if you’re willing to use online banking and create a digital archive of crucial records, you may even be able to go paper-free.

Before you dig into those piles of records and statements, invest in a shredder to guard against identity theft. And don’t skimp on the shredder….”

Or do as one of our friends did and have a glass of wine with a friend and a fireplace and burn the old documents in the fire with an “alternative shredding party” where they talked and fed the fireplace log. But make sure you really don’t need those papers!

Here is some information from a filing system called Freedom Filer that uses color coding to make filing and life easier:

“Set Up A Self-Purging Reference File System
Saving files for future reference is essential, but unless you create a maintenance-free reference system you’re going to find yourself constantly cleaning out your filing cabinet, having to set up new folders, and not having the right files at hand when you need them. The answer is to divide your filing cabinet into four sections, color-coded if possible: GREEN for monthly miscellaneous transactions, BLUE for tax-related transactions, RED for permanent family and property records, ORANGE/YELLOW for current policies, agreements, and up-to-date administrative files. You may set up an optional fifth section in PURPLE, for saving literature, articles, and notes. The main sections are called Monthly, Tax, Permanent, and Remove/Replace, and the optional section is called Resource….”

Estate Planning

While none of us really want to think about it, estate planning is an important part of financial planning. Siftsort.com can help you when you are planning with your advisors and family.

According to the Wall Street Journal, there are “25 Documents You Need Before You Die”

“It isn’t enough simply to sign a bunch of papers establishing an estate plan and other end-of-life instructions. You also have to make your heirs aware of them and leave the documents where they can find them.

Consider: At least 10 states have been investigating whether some of the country’s largest insurers are failing to pay out unclaimed life policies to beneficiaries. California and Florida have held public hearings on the issue….

The financial consequences of failing to keep your documents in order can be significant. According to the National Association of Unclaimed Property Administrators, state treasurers currently hold $32.9 billion in unclaimed bank accounts and other assets. ”

Siftsort.com is perfect for making your heirs aware of your estate plan and the necessary documents with the secure sharing feature. Sign up today for your free Siftsort.com account and start using it. If you need more storage space, you can add it by using a credit card, plus get a dedicated fax line along with that additional space.