Document Vaults

[ERISA1]

Hi - Historically, we have delivered documents to our clients in hard copy binders. We want to switch to a digital vault.

1 Has anyone been working with vaults? What is your experiences?

2 Do you know of any service providers whose product is well suited to retirement plan administration?

3 Are using a secure system to send emails? Does that tie in to the vault? If not, can you recommend vendor?

Thank you very much.

Dave

[MoJo]

I work with people who have access to and use two such vaults. One was custom developed by the financial advisor group (large, multi-office) and mirrors a "checklist" of likely documents requested by regulatory audits (DOL or IRS) - so it contains plan docs, investment reviews, fee disclosures, service provider contracts and a bunch of other stuff. Frankly, I think it's more of a marketing tool than an actual one (meaning, they hype it to prospects, and use it to store things, but mostly clients ignore it - and if they ask for a document, someone emails it to them anyway (nothing with identifying info/SSNs, etc). It isn't used for any "admin" type of documents, or transactional info - so secure emails isn't linked in any way. The other vault available is an LPL provided solution (for their advisors) - which is similar to the custom vault.

Keys to consider are ease of use for BOTH the one storing the document and the ones retrieving the document; the types of documents stored (are they "archived" or active?); and ease of use for the one storing the document and the ones retrieving the document (yes,I repeat myself because NEITHER one of the vaults available tot he people I work with are really easy to get things into them (but are pretty straight-forward in getting thigs out of them.

Check out this article for some of the issues. Not sure what your business is, but this seemed to resonate with me: http://www.kitces.com/blog/have-financial-advisors-gotten-off-track-with-client-vaults/