MS Morgan Stanley

By Sara Castellanos 

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, rolled out this summer, employs technology from Box Inc., an online content-management and file-sharing service for businesses. The tool reflects financial institutions' confidence in shifting confidential records from their own servers to third-party systems accessed online, or in the cloud.

The platform is part of a broader transformation of the bank's wealth-management business, which oversees about $2.5 trillion in assets for U.S. clients, said Sal Cucchiara, chief information officer and head of wealth-management technology at Morgan Stanley. "If we're going to take advantage of cutting-edge technology, we need to embrace and adopt more [of the cloud] as well," he said.

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.

Six Morgan Stanley employees spent about a year using Box's technology to develop the vault, which is provided to customers free of charge. "We had to make sure we had the security in place that was going to make us comfortable," Mr. Cucchiara said.

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. Such features meet the auditing and analytics standards required by regulatory bodies including the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Box said.

Morgan Stanley is using an undisclosed third party to host the keys used to encrypt the data, Mr. Cucchiara said. That means Morgan Stanley can 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.

"When you think about the evolution of cloud and...financial services...it's really about how we're managing security," Mr. Cucchiara said.

Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie said that regulated industries have entrusted more of their data to cloud companies during the past two years. Box has customers in sectors including financial services, health care and the government.

"You're seeing this pretty incredible trend of more regulated industries moving to the cloud for speed, agility, security, end-user experience and employee productivity," Mr. Levie said.

Raj Bala, a research director at Gartner Inc., agreed with Mr. Levie, saying that confidence is based on the use of encryption.

In the wealth-management business, the shift to online and mobile business picked up about three years ago, according to Mr. Cucchiara. "The landscape has changed," he said. "Our clients are using technology in a much broader way than they had in the past."

Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 24, 2019 18:06 ET (22:06 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.