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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.

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

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.

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!

CPAs: Preparing for Year-End Tax Planner Mailings? Here’s a tip.

Many CPAs mail organizers to their clients at year end. There’s a cost to print, stuff envelopes, and mail the organizers, plus the labor to do all of that.

Other CPAs will email a link to a password protected PDF version of a client tax organizer. However, the passwords maybe too easy to guess and are based on other information that is readily accessible.

An alternative is to use Siftsortpro.com – then the CPA firm can securely share sensitive files using a number of different methods. Either share a folder with a client using Siftsort.com, then drop-n-drag the files into the folder. Or securely email the content from the Siftsortpro.com platform directly to the client using the Siftsort.com platform, or for clients who are not using the Siftsort.com platform, simply send a secure link, where the data is housed on our secure server, and the client can safely retrieve it after entering a one-time passcode sent to them. With all methods, the sensitive material never leaves the secure Siftsort environment, ensuring its safe delivery.

Then, as year-end financial data is gathered, clients can put their numbers in the organizer and securely share the content in the same manner with the CPA. In addition, keeping the backup documentation for themselves in a folder in their personal Siftsort.com account.

This can make the process smoother in addition to being more secure and less labor intensive (saves money) for the accounting firm as well as the client. All organized and all in one place, secure, shareable and accessible from anywhere.