Protecting information assets and digital documents is table stakes at all levels of your organization. From signed clients agreements processed by your head office to the various confidential documents your professionals and clients “take home”, properly securing confidential and important documents should never be an overlooked area.  

According to Forbes, “a digital world demands digital documents” —  and with an increasingly virtual culture, there is a trending shift towards knowing these documents are secure. Non-compliance, data breaches, and other information security risks can pose major threats to your organization, especially if they involve sensitive client information or have access to critical financial data. With so much on the line in the event of something going wrong, keeping these types of documents safe is no longer just an option — it’s table stakes for information governance in a post-pandemic world.  

Below, we’ll breakdown exactly why investing in information security is a critical component to your overall risk management framework, along with some of the ways in which secure digital vaults can provide immediate benefits across the multiple levels of your organization and functions.  

Investing in Document Security Avoids Non-Compliance Fees & Reputation Loss

Information security specifically as it relates to protecting documents is a big business, and for good reason. In the case of financial services, non-compliance fees average around $14.8 million every year, compared to that of the average spend of $5.5 million as a compliance investment. It is 2.7 times more costly for your organization to turn a blind eye to compliance than to think ahead and make an investment. Even if your company might not have realized the importance of keeping documents safe (47% of organizations claimed keeping their policies current with changing regulations was their number one challenge), the regulatory industry certainly has. Mandates have increased 500% since 2008, and document retention requirements in the United States, Canada, and the UK have tightened up significantly over the past decade.  

Following the rules related to document retention might seem somewhat challenging — and costly, especially when it concerns smaller advisory firms or independent financial advisors — but it’s worthwhile to have a plan in place to keep your information safe, secure, and accessible. While the penalties for noncompliance with document and record-keeping are steep (reprimands, suspensions, fines, or even expulsion from the membership body) the damage to your company’s reputation from noncompliance can be even greater. The money you spend on keeping your documents safe can save you millions in the future — so if you’re thinking of investing in information security, there’s no better time to start.

Digital Vaults Keep Enterprise Documents Safe from Data Breaches & Loss

In addition to potentially saving millions of dollars on compliance fees, having a strategy in place for document security can also keep your business safe. Data breaches, security threats, and other forms of data loss can usually be traced back to poor information governance, of which document security often plays a significant role. Even if your information governance and document security policies are not directly correlated to incidents, they can often make the consequences of the data breach or loss a lot worse than they might have been otherwise — not being able to locate crucial files for litigation, an audit, or a government inquiry can mean big trouble for your business.  

Hefty fines, suspensions, and risks to your organization’s reputation aren’t something you want to risk, especially at the enterprise level. 60% of small organizations go out of business within 6 months after a serious data breach, and the average cost for a lost or compromised record is $148. These costs add up, especially considering they are preventable in the first place.

One of the biggest components of information governance practices is getting your information organized, identified, and managed so that it can be used for other purposes. At the enterprise level, if you’re missing the basic organizational components (and rules) for using your digital documents day-to-day, your data is almost certainly at risk. How are you making sure each file in your enterprise’ care is properly stored, tracked, and maintained day to day? How can you making sure employees have access to the data they need, without exposing too much of your clients information? How can you avoid collecting too much data, or holding onto it for so long it starts to become a risk?

Digital security provides solutions to many of these problems. With the right technology, such as a secure digital vault, you can not only store your documents safely at the enterprise level, you can easily established information governance policies that protect your organization — knowing how, where, and when your data is stored (as well as having a record of who has accessed it) can be crucial to preventing the worst of outcomes.  

Digital Vaults Keep Your Business Compliant and Your Clients' Data Safe

Whenever a client's personal information or financial data is in your care, you have an obligation, by law, to be fully responsible for keeping it safe. For industry professionals and firms operating independent of larger enterprise, it can certainly be challenging to keep up with constant regulatory changes and new rules around keeping documents and confidential data secure. While smaller firms may not have as much to worry about as a large enterprise operating with multiple lines of businesses or even with different jurisdictions, they are still required to maintain and meet compliance requirements set forth by regulators. Having a secure digital vault to store, manage, and access your documents within one centralized location, provides you peace of mind and confidence in knowing that all of your records remain safe and secured as they should be.  

Importantly, platforms like FutureVault provide workflow efficiencies while satisfying compliance requirements that lead to tremendous time and cost savings and streamline the ability to securely share and collaborate with trusted third party professionals.  

Did you know that document challenges account for over 20% of productivity loss, and the average worker spends more than half of their time searching for information? With customized taxonomies, indexing and OCR functionality, managing critical documents shouldn’t and doesn’t feel like the cumbersome process many associate it with.  

Digital Vaults Keep Confidential Client Documents Safe

Securely managing your documents is not only important at the top and middle levels of your organization, it provides tremendous benefits right down to your clients and the households you work closely with on a daily basis. When your firm proactively employs and maintains proper data safety protocols, your clients personal information is kept secure — whether you’re dealing with  administrative paperwork, investment statements, new client agreement forms, tax returns, mortgage agreements, onboarding information, you name it, your clients important data remains easy to find, accessible, organized, and importantly safe and secure.  

This provides immediate benefits for you front and back-office teams, notably the professionals that work closely with clients, while also extending the value beyond the organization by making clients’ everyday lives easier by enabling them to reign control of their personal life and documents. Consequently, traditional methods of storing personal documents — such as filing cabinets, on a hard drive, in storage rooms, or personal safes — are incredibly unreliable, inefficient, and don’t provide the proper protection against natural disaster or in the case of fire and/or theft.  

With 78 million dementia sufferers expected by the year 2030, there’s never been a more pressing time for clients to take ownership of their financial information and documents. Whether it’s storing Wills and/or legal documents digitally — with easy ways for clients to access them — or appointing a designated executor or guardian with access to confidential files, document security can help your clients stay organized while safeguarding their most sensitive information.