Morgan Stanley Creates Encrypted Vault for Wealth-Management Customers

In a recent story by The Wall Street Journal, Morgan Stanley is offering its 3.2 million wealth-management customers an encrypted platform where they can store financial documents and share them with the bank more securely than faxing, emailing or mailing information. The Digital Vault employs technology from Box Inc., an online content-management and file-sharing service for businesses. The infrastructure of the Digital Vault is based on Box Platform, which allows customers and third-party developers to create custom applications in the cloud, without building and maintaining their own content-management services. Box encrypts data when it’s in transit and when it’s being stored and allows the bank to see everything that happens to that data, including who accesses it and when it was shared and downloaded. It also lets Morgan Stanley control document access. Morgan Stanley is using an undisclosed third party to host the keys used to encrypt the data, allowing Morgan Stanley to encrypt and decrypt all the data that goes in and out of the digital vault, ensuring an extra layer of control besides what Box provides. The platform is part of a broader transformation of the bank’s wealth-management business, which oversees approximately $2.5 trillion in assets for U.S. clients.