Wealth Enhancement Group Replaced Weeks of SFTP Provisioning for Outside-Counsel Files With Files.com

Wealth Enhancement Group is one of the largest independent wealth management firms in the United States, with more than $158 billion in client assets and more than 180 offices nationwide. Much of that scale came through acquisition: Echelon has named the firm the industry's most active acquirer of advisory practices for three consecutive years. Its advisory arm is registered with the SEC and its brokerage operates under FINRA, so the documents it handles are regulated as well as sensitive.

A firm built this way runs on exchange with outside parties. Custodians and clearing firms move data with it by machine. Its procurement team moves documents with outside counsel, vendors, and deal counterparties by hand. Every one of those exchanges carries confidential financial and legal material, so every one of them needs a channel the firm controls. And at Wealth Enhancement Group, as at most companies, getting a secure channel historically meant asking IT to build one.

A Three-to-Four-Week Queue for Every Secure Channel

Managing documentation with outside counsel is daily work for the firm's procurement team, and it is time-sensitive work: the documents belong to engagements that are moving now.

The channel was the problem. Whenever the team needed a secure file exchange set up with an outside party, the request went to internal IT, whose SFTP solution came with an admitted three-to-four-week lead time and a clunky result at the end of it. Attempts to stand up SFTP without IT went no better.

The diagnosis was structural, not a matter of effort. Secure exchange at the firm was gated on infrastructure provisioning: each channel was something IT had to build and maintain per counterparty. Demand from the business ran daily. Supply ran in weeks. At a firm adding practices, vendors, and legal engagements at Wealth Enhancement Group's pace, that gap only widens.

The Channel the Firm Already Ran

What procurement needed was not a faster queue. It needed no queue: a governed exchange a business user could open the day the work arrived, that an outside law firm could authenticate into with nothing to install, and that kept the firm's identity and audit controls on every document.

The firm already had one. Files.com was already Wealth Enhancement Group's platform for exchanging files with the custodians and vendors that transact over SFTP and FTPS. Procurement made Files.com the channel for its outside-counsel documentation as well.

“It's been pretty terrible when we try to set that up ourselves, or I go to the IT team ... they admit it will take three to four weeks to set it up, and then it'll be clunky.”

Governed on Both Sides of the Exchange

Nothing had to be provisioned for procurement to start. Internal users sign in to Files.com through the firm's Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on. External participants authenticate as well, and they carry a requirement internal users don't: the firm keeps two-factor authentication in force for every user outside its own directory. Access is scoped, so an outside firm reaches the folders shared with it and nothing else. Because every upload and download runs through Files.com, every exchange lands in an activity log the firm holds.

From Weeks of Waiting to Three Times a Day

With Files.com as the exchange channel, procurement replaced a per-request provisioning cycle with a capability it operates itself.

• Procurement manages in-and-out documentation with outside counsel on Files.com at least three times a day. The exchange happens the day the work does, not weeks after a request.
• Opening a secure exchange with the next counterparty is a permissions decision on the platform, not an infrastructure build. Nothing about a new law firm or vendor puts procurement back in a queue.
• Every exchange with an outside party is on the record: authenticated access on both sides, and a Files.com audit trail the firm can produce on demand.

Secure Exchange as a Capability, Not a Project

Secure exchange with an outside party stopped being infrastructure that IT builds per counterparty and became a standing capability of the platform the firm already runs.