Box announces FINRA compliance and file-retention features in financial services push

Cloud file sharing company Box today is introducing new features that financial services companies should welcome.

The company is introducing support for watermarks, the ability to set policies on how long files can be stored on Box, and compliance with federal FINRA standards.

And not only that — Box is showing off new financial services customers: AAA, FICO, Guaranteed Rate, KKR, Legg Mason, and Nationwide.

The news follows Box’s announcement earlier this month of its Enterprise Key Management service for securely storing encryption keys.

Taken together, the new features and customer wins show Box is determined to prove the value of its cloud-based service for the coveted financial services sector in particular and big business in general. The company has expressed an intent to build product packages that are tailored to several industries.

Other file-sharing services, such as Egnyte and Citrix ShareFile, offer some of the features Box is introducing now. For example, both Egnyte and ShareFile are FINRA-compliant, for instance. But Box runs exclusively as a cloud service. The FINRA compliance does distinguish Box from some other cloud-only services, like Dropbox and Google Drive.

Box’s Retention Management feature allows admins to set retention periods to keep files from being deleted for a period of time of their choosing. When that time period is over, Box “ensures proper disposition” of the files, according to a blog post today.

“Providing IT and compliance teams the tools to properly govern all their content and meet legal, compliance and other business mandates will transform the financial services industry,” Rand Wacker, vice president for enterprise product at Box, wrote in the blog post.

The new watermarking feature looks compelling as well. Here’s Wacker describing its capabilities:

With watermarking, Box customers can easily and effectively assert ownership over critical documents, track the source for downloaded and shared confidential information and ultimately deter content leaks. Admins will be able to enforce visible source identification on documents that can be previewed in Box, including formats like MS Office files, PDF files and images. Furthermore, the solution will dynamically mark the document with the viewer’s e-mail address and time stamp, letting the owner not just assert ownership, but also remind the recipient that they are responsible for their copy of the file. Moreover, watermarks can be included when representations of files are downloaded from Box.

Time will tell how these new features might translate into considerable new business for Box, which went public last month.