Compared to traditional document collection methods such as hard copy delivery and email, document portals deliver security, efficiency & unified storage.
Although most people continue to rely on email for the digital exchange of documents at work or in application processes such as loans and college admissions, another more secure and more efficient option has come to market.
Client document portals, like the FileInvite Portal™, provide a direct and secure channel of exchange and storage for data, digital signatures, and documents that may contain sensitive or personally identifiable information (PII).
Compared to traditional document collection methods such as hard copy delivery and email, client document portals deliver three valuable benefits to organizations that process high volumes of documents.
1. Enhanced File Sharing Security
Among surveyed IT leaders, 95% believe that email poses a major risk to client and company data. Studies corroborate this suspicion, with 83% reporting companies having experienced an email data breach in the last twelve months. While users can encrypt the contents of their emails, most don’t; and emails, by default, transmit in plain text. Document portals can establish top-down security protocols such as end-to-end encryption for all data in transit and at rest.
Bankers report that the document collection phase of loan applications consumes as much as 40% of their sales cycle time. Document portals can cut turnaround times for this loan application phase by up to 80%.
Gathering delivered documentation from various email threads, hard copies, and other storage formats wastes yours and your client's time. Document portals make all client documentation accessible to you and the client in a single repository, providing you and your team overall visibility into which requests are outstanding, which are returned (and possibly need revisions) and which are approved and able to progress.
Here’s a list of five key features to look for when you’re in the market for a document portal service.
The overall quality of data security in an organization stems from both technology and employee practices.
The highest-grade file-sharing security measure for technology is end-to-end 256-bit encryption (E2EE) for data in transit and storage. According to current estimates, the time range for breaking E2EE by brute force is approximately 2.29 x 1032 years, making exposure through criminal ingress a practical impossibility.
As for employee information security practices, error-proofing an organization is an order of magnitude more difficult and ultimately unpredictable. Studies show that human activity – either by error or malicious intent – accounts for 88% of all data breaches. When shopping for data services from third-party vendors, it’s difficult to know whom to trust.
An invaluable metric for evaluating services is available in the Service Organization Controls (SOC) maintained by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). The AICPA grants SOC certifications at different levels to organizations that allow transparent monitoring of their information security practices over an extended period of time. For organizations that handle sensitive personal and financial data, the SOC 2 Type 2 certification is the gold standard and should be maintained by any service provider you choose.
In today’s increasingly cloud-native environment, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms shouldn’t require a major investment of time and IT services on your end to get up and running. Ideally, a high-quality service should deploy with default features instantly, allowing you to make your custom configurations as needed.
The typical organization uses an average of 110 SaaS applications. Bringing another service onboard shouldn’t involve developers writing custom code to integrate with the systems you already use. Out-of-the-box integrations should include major cloud applications such as DropBox, Google Drive, and Zapier.
Most email platforms have an attachment file size limit of 25 MB. However, the practical limit in most cases is closer to half that as file formatting before sending often doubles the size of the attachment. In document-intensive processes such as loan applications, limitations on file size can fragment a client’s efforts to send multiple documents quickly and effectively, resulting in wasted time.
Any client document portal you adopt should offer unlimited file upload size.
Studies indicate that 90% of organizations intend to make a significant amount of remote or semi-remote roles permanent, even in the absence of temporary pandemic restrictions. In a normalized distributed workforce, employees will need access to data on the go and from multiple device platforms such as laptops, phones, and tablets.
Universal device compatibility should be a feature of client document portal services.
The FileInvite Portal™ offers all the features covered above and more. FileInvite guarantees bank-grade security with E2EE for data in transit or storage and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. Out-of-the-box, FileInvite deploys in as little as five minutes and integrates seamlessly with the most commonly used cloud-based applications. All uploaded documentation is stored in a single, organized repository for users and clients, removing bottlenecks and delays from document collection processes allowing you to save time and achieve maximum business impacts.
To learn more and request a demo, visit FileInvite today.
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