covid – SIFTSORT: BLOG | PRESS

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.

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. ”

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!

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!