merrill lynch – SIFTSORT: BLOG | PRESS

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.

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.

Client Uses for Siftsort.com Part III

OK, now that those two families from Part I and Part II have all the medical info shared among the relevant parties, what happens with the billing? Get ready for flurries of paper coming down on both. It’s not just the billing, but the repeated Explanation of Benefits, the revised EOBs, the bill from the hospital, the bill from the doctor, the bill from the anesthesiologist, the billing showing your portion is paid and have a zero balance, the Medicare part is paid, the Medicare supplement has paid.

The daughter of one of the previous patients has gotten 5 months of those zero balance statements for the same $24.00 bill, each time with an envelope to send a payment.
What a waste!

These can also be scanned, emailed or faxed to the client’s individual Siftsort.com account and then shared with their accountant when it comes time to prepare taxes, so they can maximize their tax benefits after all the medical issues they have had.

Institutions could do a much better job of dealing with their clients if they were using a Siftsort.com enterprise solution. Instead of wasting paper and postage and administering a confused mess, they could be using their resources in a more client-focused way. We are working with several forward-thinking companies right now who are looking to do just that.

Client Uses for Siftsort.com Part II

Ironically, when the daughter of the couple from the last post was talking with a friend about her Thanksgiving, she found out that her friend’s 94-year-old mother-in-law had fallen due to an undiagnosed infection that had gotten very bad. These Californians were visiting family in Kansas, but the mother-in-law was in Nebraska, and they had to make a detour to see her. Fortunately all, the travel rearrangements worked out.

Managing the health of someone long distance is hard enough without having to remember different sites and login passwords.

Siftsort.com can help the family members with managing the healthcare needs of their family members, whether it’s young adults away at college, elderly family members, or kids in high school sports. Or what about a family vacation?

Patient portals offered by hospitals generally do not allow you to share your records outside of their hospital. It is designed that way to try and keep you at their hospital – but not very user friendly. Plus, who’s going to remember all the passwords for all the different patient portals in an emergency? Its your data about you. Why should you be held hostage for your data? What if you need to share information with a specialist in another state? What if family members are taking turns caring for the ill person? How are you going to share the information securely? What happens with updates to the medical condition? How does that information get disseminated securely among the family members?

Siftsort.com, that’s how!

If you are wondering why we can send people to live for months on the International Space Station, yet our medical system is so complex to interact with… know that you don’t have to wait, you can simplify your medical and financial life with Siftsort.com!

What Happens When Siftsortpro.com is Combined with Siftsort.com?

Friday Case Study: One of the ways professionals are using Siftsortpro.com is to work with their clients in a way that is secure, but simplifies all their lives and their work flow.

Instead of logging in to several different accounts, there is one secure login that allows the professional to securely share documents, store documents, chat and email with clients, allows them to send emails to all their clients at the same time, share information individually, and so on.

For example, an accountant sending our their year-end tax organizer can send out an email to all clients, saying “watch for an upcoming email with their individual tax organizer, print it out, put in a folder and then as year-end statements come in, put the statements in the folder and have it all together for a quick time to review and fill out.’

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, one CPA firm did this and saved over $50,000/year, allowing the employees to spend their time with clients instead of shuffling paper.

Then, they can send the individual tax planner to each individually either from a secure folder (if the client is a Siftsort.com user), or by sending a secure link to each client (if not using Siftsort.com).

Alternatively, they can even avoid the trouble of the paper files and if they are used to getting online statements form their bank, investment accounts and whatever else, they can upload to their individual Siftsort.com account and share that set of documents with their accountant. Then using the chat function, they can communicate with their tax professional in a secure environment instantly.

All of this is within a secure environment. When the two platforms are used with each other, the data and transmission of files never leaves our environment, or exposing itself to the Internet. Files are securely transferred from within our environment (server-to-server). As also mentioned in previous blog post, customers can be so happy, they refer other clients, family and friends. If you are a professional advisor, isn’t that the kind of ringing endorsement you want?

Case Study: A CPA Firm Client Hack Drives Innovation

An accounting firm had recently implemented Siftsortpro.com after one of their large clients had her email hacked while traveling abroad.

The culprits had studied her email subject matter, vernacular and such and derived a way to send a series of emails from her account, to her administrator and broker requesting the transfer of nearly $400,000 over a few weeks time period. A similar task she would due as part of her normal course of business to certain vendors and partners.

While the accounting firm was not directly involved in any way, the partners realized the importance of not sending sensitive client information through their corporate email system. Data breaches can cost a CPA their license to practice.

Cost Savings That Matter
After implementation and training the 13-person firm, they realized an annual savings of $52,800 on postage, envelopes, paper, toner and reduced man-hours.

They increased the productivity of their entire office by streamlining the workflow and securely sharing client documents using Siftsortpro.com and having their clients use Siftsort.com.

“Siftsort saves of time, money and gives us peace of mind knowing that client files are highly secure”, Ross Wisdom, CPA

Everyday consumers are transmitting sensitive personal information to their trusted professionals in an unsecured manner. Its reckless to pass a blank form to a client in email and expect them to fill it out and simply email it back. As crazy as this sounds, it happens annually with my own insurance agent. Of course, I never comply instead using my own products (Siftsort.com) to send her a secure link to safely retrieve the documents from me. But come on? Wake up!

Advisors Can Help Clients Get (and Stay) Organized

Some people have been audited more than once. We all know its a scary thing. A friend of mine had her first, which was a “practice audit”.

She had shredded most of her older financial data, and in January 2003, she had to recreate almost everything from scratch for the audit year. This was because the auditor, who was on his second-ever IRS audit, was looking at everything since there wasn’t a specific problem. Needless to say, this was a tedious, time-consuming, and an unnecessarily stressful experience to have to gather everything again.

Financial advisors and accountants can help their clients get (and stay) organized by asking them to set up a FREE Siftsort.com account to securely organize information regarding their financial data, healthcare, tax-deductible receipts, vehicles and business expenses, dependents and more. This would also help them be ready for tax season or an audit, keeping records easily accessible to help get the maximum tax benefits available.

In the case of my friend, she had to go back to a three banks to get the data on 7 bank accounts for the audit. Plus, she had to pay the banks for all of the copies on top of that.

Now, electronic banking and bill payment simplifies all of that, but keep in mind most banks do not keep online statements for more than 3 years, making you pay a retrieval fee for statements in the later years. Unless you are still getting printed statements, you have no choice but to pay the fees.

With their advisor using a Siftsortpro.com account, they and their clients–using their personal, secure Siftsort.com account–can collaborate securely when making tax or financial decisions, whether through email, chat, fax…anywhere in the world.

Instead of keeping paper copies that can get lost or pile up in files, clients can forward the information to their Siftsort.com account, categorize it in a way that makes sense and easily be able to access the information when needed. Simplifying your life.