Dive Brief:
- Morgan Stanley is partnering with Box to launch a cloud-based encrypted document-sharing portal. More than 1 million clients will be able to store and share their wills, deeds, estate plans and financial statements with their financial advisers using the platform. About 95,000 companies, including General Electric, State Street and USAA, store documents with Box, but Morgan Stanley is one of the first to let clients share documents.
- The move comes as companies and clients alike seek to improve data security after a spate of high-profile breaches. In one of the most widespread cases, credit-rating company Equifax agreed to pay up to $700 million in connection with a 2017 leak that exposed the Social Security numbers and birth dates of nearly 150 million Americans, the Federal Trade Commission said Monday.
- Morgan Stanley's application for uploading documents sits in front of the Box platform. Box encrypts the documents at rest and in transfer, handles access permissions and has an audit trail that shows who has looked at what, American Banker reported.
Dive Insight:
"Protecting our clients' assets and personal information is our top concern, and this is our latest investment in safety and security at scale," Sal Cucchiara, Morgan Stanley's chief information officer for wealth management, said in a press release Monday.
The price of faulty data protection can be steep. Up to $425 million of Equifax's settlement is set to compensate consumers and provide credit monitoring for those whose data was compromised. Equifax is also paying $175 million to 48 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, and $100 million to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
"By investing in a cloud content management platform like Box and leveraging other best-of-breed technology partners, we have been able to create a more secure, efficient and collaborative environment for conducting business," Naureen Hassan, chief digital officer at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, said in an emailed statement to CIO Dive.
