With great power comes great responsibility—this could not be more evident or true within financial services and in particular for compliance teams.
Financial services organizations remain responsible for managing and protecting not only customers’ money but for safeguarding their most sensitive financial and personal information as well.
Constant changes to regulation, growing practice management concerns around insecure document exchanges, data breaches, fines, and costs associated with non-compliance, all add to the complexity and challenges compliance teams, and in particular compliance officers, are faced with.
When you consider the impact and significance the above has on your daily operations and client relationships, there is no wonder why spending on compliance programs and technology remains one of the largest investments that financial firms will make in any given year.
Turning a blind eye to compliance is not only bad practice, but also detrimental to your firm’s ability to build relationships, scale operations, and focus on core strategic outcomes for your clients.
We can show you exactly how having the right systems, processes, and technologies, such as a Multi-Tier Digital Vault platform like FutureVault, can enable compliance teams, and entire organizations, to not only adopt best practices but also unlock massive operational efficiencies and win the hearts, minds, and wallets of consumers.
Multi-Tiered Digital Vaults provide a secure, centralized repository for all Enterprise, Back Office, Front Office, and Client documents
Digital Vaults provide access to all enterprise, back office, front office, and client documents within one secure, centralized, and convenient location.
In other words, Digital Vaults facilitate the centralized governance of information assets and documents to ensure compliance at scale across the entire organization – across all lines of business and jurisdictions.
From both compliance and operational perspectives, having every piece of information accessible within one secure environment solves several business challenges including: knowing exactly where corporate and client information exists, when documents were deposited, who deposited them, and knowing exactly who has had access to them over time.
This is incredibly powerful when considering the importance of having a secure repository for documents such as new client agreements, account transfer forms, KYC, and AML documents—all critical pieces of information that compliance teams absolutely must have access to when needed.
For complex institutions with multiple support departments and lines of business, having secured and centralized governance of information alleviates not only a considerable amount of professional time but is indicative of whether or not organizations can scale without comprising compliance.
By consolidating multi-source documents and information access into one single, centralized “Golden Source”, your entire organization will reap the benefits.
Securing your information assets within one location provides compliance teams with “evidence” that policies and procedures are adhered to across the entire organization and are “discoverable” for internal or external audits.
Digital Vaults bolster corporate governance and improve organizational standards
By having a secure and centralized multi-tiered repository, firms can confidently demonstrate corporate governance across multiple departments and their own internal committees.
From board meetings to enterprise risk management or departmental committees, each unit has its own unique set of responsibilities, “internalized” documents, policies, procedures, and meetings. When aggregating this across the entire organization, this complexity alone stresses the importance of having standardized corporate governance.
While corporate governance is one of the most fundamental risk management pillars, it is an area where many firms and compliance teams struggle to manage—and not because it is neglected, but often because of complexities and legacy information practices.
Multi-Tiered Digital Vaults provide compliance teams with the power they need to effectively test and demonstrate that corporate governance is in place, and ensure that head office, back office, and frontline staff are following compliance policies holistically across the entire organization.
Digital Vaults streamline audit readiness cycles and resources
One of the most significant benefits Digital Vaults materialize for compliance teams is the ability to 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 features such as the ability to tag documents with customized meta-data, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned documents, entity relationships, and audit trails, all contribute toward streamlining the search for and locating of specific documents.
There is more good news. Digital Vaults can eliminate the time-consuming back and forth exchange with auditors requesting “evidence”.
How?
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 a “real-time” 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 a Vault down to a specific document.
Add to your toolkit the ability to create custom audit preparation checklists for your internal teams and it is clear to see how the FutureVault platform significantly reduces the time and resources required to complete an audit.
Digital Vaults eliminate insecure, noncompliant, and inefficient ways of sharing and collecting information
Despite being slow, insecure, and noncompliant, email remains one of the most prevalent communication methods to send and receive sensitive corporate and client information.
The problem is exacerbated by legacy systems that make it easy for physical paper to still find its way into internal and external processes—from new client onboarding and account transfers to training materials and corporate notices.
These two drivers—email and physical paper—are a major cause for concern when it comes to cybersecurity and compliance.
The answer? Digital Vaults.
FutureVault’s SOC 2 Type II Multi-Tiered Digital Vault Platform enables 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.
By securely automating internal and external processes, Digital Vaults equip modern firms by speeding up back and front office processes and improving daily workflow, saving your firm time, money, and human capital.
Are you ready to level up your document-related workflows and processes?
Digital Vaults make it easy to securely distribute updated policies, procedures, and corporate documents
The ever-evolving regulatory landscape requires compliance teams to keep their finger on the pulse of rules and regulations. This means that Compliance teams are constantly updating corporate policies, governance documents, and training materials.
The flow works as follows:
Regulatory Change ➜ Update Policies ➜ Update Procedures ➜ Notify/Train Staff of Changes ➜ Embed into “Business As Usual” practices ➜ Test and demonstrate your firm is Compliant on demand.
A Multi-Tiered Digital Vault platform like FutureVault streamlines the ability to distribute any type of document instantaneously and securely across your front, middle, and back-office teams and even with your clients, where applicable.
FutureVault’s unique Global Folder functionality allows teams to populate, replace, and update documents within folders that are universally available to your team.
Additional Document Distribution tools make it easy to share resources and materials securely on a 1-to-1, 1-to-many, or even many-to-1 basis in real-time.
FutureVault’s Audit Trail allows Compliance teams to evidence that changes in regulations have been institutionalized across the enterprise.
Digital Vaults allow you to provide key stakeholders with specific access and permissions
Sharing corporate and client information is always a major consideration for compliance teams. Fortunately, FutureVault’s patented Trusted Advisor permissioning model eliminates access concerns.
Only those that you grant access (internal or external) to will be able to view, manage and collaborate with your organization and with specific documents.
For your compliance team, it affords you the ability to grant access to corporate and client documents directly to third-party auditors or regulators.
For your front office, it provides them with the ability to provide access to other third-party professionals involved in key areas of wealth and estate planning without compromising security.
For your clients, it means they can now easily provide access to their family members or network of Trusted Advisors (lawyers, accountants, wealth advisors) without compromising the security of their documents.
This degree of precision permissioning down to a specific document or set of documents within a folder ensures that important activities take place while adhering to information security and compliance standards.
Digital Vaults provide you with a birds-eye view of every action at all times, in real-time
Transparency, accountability, and 24×7 peace of mind. Fiduciary audit trails provide your team with exactly that by easily (and in real-time) tracking any and every activity that takes place within a Vault and to individual documents.
Internally, audit trails can provide compliance teams with the insight to know exactly who has viewed new policies or training documents as an example. This can provide significant transparency and accountability for internal process changes that take place.
Externally, audit trails can provide regulators or auditors with the precise information they need to understand who has viewed, accessed, downloaded, shared, etc., critical documents.
Ultimately, having a fiduciary audit trail allows your team to keep a historical record on all activity that takes place within Vaults at all times—meaning that you can rest easy at night knowing your information has 24×7 surveillance.
Digital Vaults provide you with confidence to operate compliance effectively and efficiently
Last but certainly not least, Digital Vaults provide compliance teams with the confidence and assurance they need to proactively manage the constantly evolving regulatory landscape, mitigate any mismanagement of corporate and client information, avoid insecure communication and document delivery methods, enable audit preparation, and more.
When your compliance team is operating efficiently and sleeping better at night, the rest of your business can follow suit. When the rest of your business follows suit, your firm can focus more time and resources on growth, acquisition, client relationships, and innovating their service offerings.
Establish your competitive edge and improve your compliance with FutureVault
Compliance teams are faced with what seems like an insurmountable responsibility at times. Multi-Tiered Digital Vaults like FutureVault enable compliance teams to continuously raise the bar and exceed expectations of Regulators or Auditors.
It is important to remember that compliance is not relegated to one division, department, or team. Compliance and noncompliance ripples throughout an entire organization and everyone has a role to play. The bottom line is this; when your compliance team wins, everyone wins. Your operations team wins, your business wins, and most importantly, your clients win.
