Ameriprise Financial: Uniting FinServ content in the Content Cloud
Welcome to our Work Unleashed series: a collection of posts from Box executives and conversations with Box customers on navigating the "new normal" of work today. Here, you'll find insights and resources that enable your teams to do their best work, anywhere, anytime.
FinServ content requires the highest level of protection. Personal client records, prospectuses on deals, financial projections, wealth management exchanges, merger and acquisition paper trails — these are just a handful of examples of assets that must be protected with both regulation and common-sense content practices.
Yet, as digital-first experiences become more and more important for how we work and transact with customers, financial companies like Ameriprise Financial can’t be held back by content locked up in siloes in order to keep it “safe.”
Ameriprise Financial’s Vice President of Technology, Jay Witthuhn, leads a group called Advisor Technology Solutions that’s responsible for the end-to-end experience of the advisor platform, which serves 18K field advisors and staff across a multichannel affiliation. In a recent conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie, Witthuhn described how his company started with Box, and how it’s going.
The beginning: A centralized content repository
Ameriprise initially enlisted Box simply as a way for advisors to store and access content in the cloud, but Witthuhn has overseen a shift in technology thinking over the past several years. Box has evolved from a secure storage capability to a central hub of content that underlies innovation across the company. "How we approach innovation is changing,” he says. “Using automation and analytics in a new way, and rethinking what integration looks like — not just tools talking to each other, but looking at the whole ecosystem as one experience."
Box has become the backend platform for data to come together so IT can run analytics and institute governance practices fluidly and securely. With the Content Cloud as its single, secure source of truth for content, Ameriprise Financial enables a more fluid experience for customers and advisors across a company’s ecosystem.
The evolution: An open API platform for innovative workflows
Witthuhn speaks of Box as an open solution that can be pulled into the broader Ameriprise customer and advisor experience through APIs and integrations. He explains: "the definition of integration has evolved. At one point it meant simply hooking up systems and seeing them talk to each other. The evolution I see today is much more about a unified experience across all the tools and applications you're partnering on with folks and also building in house."
While this trend is true across industries, as companies of all kinds aim to enact more engaging digital experiences for customers and employees, in FinServ, evolving definitions of innovation and integration must keep pace with regulatory requirements — and, frankly, customer expectations of privacy and control over data. That’s why Ameriprise works closely and proactively with Box to ensure compliance and security in the Content Cloud, in a way that’s specific to their FinServ requirements.
The Content Cloud: A compliant and collaborative solution
After all, as Witthuhn says, "Gone are the days when solutions were agnostic of industry. Financial services is a regulated industry for good reason. The solution providers we work with will be ones really tailoring their products to industries."
Collaboration has fundamentally changed, particularly as we emerge from a pandemic year. Customer and employee expectations of conducting business remotely and digitally — always having access to the data and content they need in a secure, convenient way — have dramatically increased. Because it can integrate with many other rich capabilities while always ensuring compliance and security, Witthuhn says, Box “is nirvana for us.”