Integrated Partners Replaces Box and OneDrive File Exchange With Files.com—Without Standardizing 200 Independent Advisors

Integrated Partners is a US financial services firm supporting a network of roughly 200 affiliated independent financial advisors. The firm is built around independence: its advisors run their own practices, and most grow through referral partnerships with accounting firms.

Its work runs on documents, with financial records and planning files moving between clients, advisors, and the home office. Compliance is central to supporting that exchange.

That model carries a built-in tension. The advisors are independent contractors. The firm supports their practices, but it does not dictate how they run them—including the software they use.

Integrated needed a firm-controlled layer in front of tools it did not control: a branded, governed intake channel that did not force independent practices to standardize their own software.

Client Files on Whatever Cloud Each Advisor Preferred

Before Files.com, client files arrived at and left the firm through whatever tool each advisor or subcontractor personally used. One practice worked out of Box, another Dropbox, another OneDrive, and some ran S3.

“We have a lot of subcontractors, and they are allowed to use whatever they want.”

The cost landed on the clients’ data. A client handing over financial documents was handing them to whichever personal cloud account their advisor happened to keep: outside the firm’s permissions, outside its retention, and under someone else’s brand.

The obvious fix was closed off. Integrated could not mandate a single tool for contractors it did not employ. Any answer that required roughly 200 independent practices to adopt the same software was no answer at all.

A Firm-Controlled Layer in Front of Tools the Firm Didn’t Control

Files.com became that layer.

Integrated moved the site onto a firm-branded domain with managed SSL, so every page a client saw carried Integrated’s name rather than a third-party tool’s. Client intake ran through Files.com Share Links with email notifications: an advisor sent a client a link on the firm’s own domain, the client uploaded documents in the browser, and the advisor was notified when they landed. Neither side had to install anything.

Each affiliated practice got its own folder under firm-set permissions, keeping its clients separate from every other practice’s. Where a practice wanted machine-to-machine transfer, it also received an SFTP credential. Advisors could retrieve client files through the Files.com web interface, while outside vendors received write-only access so they could deliver files without seeing folder contents.

Deleted-file retention was extended to 90 days to match the firm’s compliance window. As exchange consolidated onto Files.com, Box and OneDrive dropped out of the firm’s file exchange.

Client Documents Under the Firm’s Name, Permissions, and Retention

With the portal in production, Integrated Partners replaced ad hoc sharing through Box and OneDrive with one governed channel under its own name. Percoskie stood up essentially the entire system himself, and the platform now supports the firm’s roughly 200-advisor network as a client-submission and internal-distribution hub.

Adding the next affiliated practice became routine provisioning rather than a new tool or project: a folder and, where wanted, an SFTP credential. Network growth no longer required Integrated to introduce another file-sharing system.

Governing a Network Without Standardizing It

Today, a client handing sensitive financial documents to an Integrated Partners advisor does it through a page carrying the firm’s own name, and the file lands in a folder the firm governs. Before Files.com, that same handoff went to whichever personal cloud account the advisor kept.

The change required no installations or wholesale standardization across independent practices. Integrated didn't govern its network by standardizing it. It put one branded, firm-controlled Files.com layer in front of 200 independent practices and let every one of them keep running its own way.