Enterprise-Transforming Digital Vaults Driven by AI and Private LLMs

[The rate of speed of financial technology development and its deepening applications continues to accelerate through a unique alchemy of tech firms now constantly integrating other or even newer tech to further enhance their value. Digital Vaults, for instance, originally provided automation, efficiency, security, and digital client experience capabilities but with the recent integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Private Large Language Models (LLMs), Digital Vaults can now deliver a new paradigm of enterprise value for financial institutions, wealth management firms, advisors, and clients. They can now power the future of financial services into a comprehensive client-centric and holistic engagement business model.

To better explore this advisor technology evolution of AI-powered Digital Vaults, we reached out to Institute Founding members Daniel Kenny, Chief Executive Officer, and Kristian Borghesan, Chief Marketing Officer, of  FutureVault –  an award-winning white-labelled, AI-Powered Digital Vault platform for financial institutions and pioneers of the Client Life Management Vault™.

As early innovators in the Digital Vault space, we asked them questions to better understand how they continue to innovate their Digital Vault technology with the recent launch of its Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) engine, and where they see this technology going to power deeper advisor–client relationships and enable better holistic family and small business financial outcomes.]

Hortz: How does an AI-powered digital vault differ from a traditional digital vault, and why is it emerging as a distinct category?

Kenny: Digital Vaults provide a secure, centralized repository for storing and exchanging documents offering material enterprise value by eliminating inefficiencies in document collection, access, and compliance. However, this fails short of unlocking the full potential of the rich information, data, and context of those documents.

Digital Vaults powered with AI, like FutureVault, represent an entirely new category – Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) – where static documents are now transformed into dynamic enterprise assets. By embedding AI and by leveraging private Large Language Models (LLMs) with Digital Vault infrastructure, firms can now extract, structure, and contextualize critical data from documents at scale, automatically. This advancement turns the traditionally manual, error-prone process, which can easily take minutes to hours per one document, into an intelligent system that delivers real-time insights, automated workflows, and compliance-ready outputs.

For example, instead of manually combing through wills, insurance policies, or trust agreements to find key details such as beneficiaries, cash values, or expiration dates, an AI-powered Digital Vault extracts that information instantly – classifying, tagging, summarizing, and delivers the capability to integrate it into enterprise systems like a CRM, Data Lake, or even an Advisor meeting intelligence platform (like Zocks). The result? Richer client engagement, deeper personalization, and dramatically improved operational efficiency.

FutureVault was built on the premise that document data is one of the most powerful yet underutilized sources of insight in financial services. When aggregated and contextualized with AI, documents become more than simply a snapshot in time – they become actionable intelligence. This is the foundation for transforming the advisor-client relationship and future-proofing the enterprise.

Hortz: What are some specific examples of use cases and benefits that an AI-powered Digital Vault platform can bring to the table for financial firms?

Borghesan: By combining Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), private LLMs, and secure Digital Vaults, platforms can automate data extraction, accelerate workflows, and generate real-time insights across the enterprise. Below is a quick snapshot of a few use cases and the enterprise value that AI-Powered Digital Vaults bring to the table:

High-Impact Use Cases by Document Type

• Wills & Trust Agreements: Extract beneficiary details, executor roles, and key clauses to populate estate planning workflows reducing manual time spent reviewing documents, keying in beneficiary names, and enhancing risk mitigation.
• Term Life Insurance Policies: Identify and extract coverage amounts, maturity dates, and beneficiaries to trigger timely renewal alerts and strengthen client protection strategies.
• Financial Plans & Investment Statements: Surface portfolio allocations, performance benchmarks, fees, and other critical reporting/plan data—enabling personalized advice and performance-driven reviews.

Critical Use Cases by Business Function

• Advisor Transitions: Automatically ingest and organize client files during advisor migration, preserving continuity and accelerating onboarding.
• Client Onboarding & KYC: Extract identity and financial data from source documents to streamline compliance, reduce errors, and cut onboarding time.
• Regulatory Compliance & Audits: Tag, classify, and structure documents to meet SEC, FINRA, and CIRO mandates producing audit-ready records without manual overhead.
• Advisor Meeting Preparation: Analyze client vault activity and extract key data to prepare advisors with contextual insights for high-impact, personalized meetings.

Enterprise-Level Benefits

• Operational Efficiency: Drastically reduce document handling time and eliminate manual data entry through intelligent automation.
• Stronger Compliance: Build structured, real-time audit trails to meet regulatory requirements with confidence.
• Advisor Enablement: Empower advisors with immediate access to critical client insights—improving advice quality and deepening relationships.
• Scalable Intelligence: Extend data intelligence across thousands of clients and advisors through a centralized, AI-enhanced platform.

Our IDP engine sitting on top of our Digital Vault construct enables firms to extract value from the most underutilized asset in their organization: the data buried in documents.

Moreover, institutions and firms that rely on mailroom document sorting, classifying, and delivery of inbound documents, benefit materially as our IDP engine can confidently identify and classify documents, extract data, and route both the extracted document data and the documents themselves to the appropriate place, based on Line of Business and/or the types of documents being ingested across the enterprise.

Hortz: What are the market drivers and trends that are making an AI-powered digital vault platform a “must-have” technology for financial advisors and wealth management firms?

Kenny: There are quite a number of market drivers and trends positioning AI-powered Digital Vault platforms as indispensable. These include:

• The Value of Previously Untapped Data (“Premium Oil”): Firms now recognize the strategic and competitive value contained within documents – information and data that was traditionally inaccessible or required considerable amount of time, money, and human capital to extract and key into other enterprise systems.
   
• Regulatory and Compliance Demands: Increasingly stringent regulatory environments and requirements have “forced” firms to adopt more efficient, scalable compliance and data governance solutions, including the accuracy and validity of information and data from within documents – or where the context of documents can augment and better position firms from a regulatory standing.
   
• Client Expectations for Digital Experiences: Clients – and not just of financial services firms for that matter – expect frictionless, digitally native interactions, creating demand for sophisticated, automated digital document exchange and insights-driven client engagement.
   
• Enterprise Digital Transformation: Institutions are prioritizing AI-driven digital transformation to optimize resources, manage risk, and unlock efficiency gains across back, middle, and front office functions as a strategic enterprise imperative. With that comes recognizing AI-powered Digital Vaults are a cornerstone technology in these initiatives to extract the goldmine of data that exists across an enterprise, line of business, advisor, and client facing documents that can ultimately deliver an unparalleled client experience.

We firmly believe that Digital Vaults – in combination with an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) engine – can materially augment any enterprise AI strategy, whether it’s used as a standalone platform, but especially, when deeply integrated with other enterprise systems by making previously unavailable data accessible to the right lines of business, stakeholders, and to clients.

Hortz: What is your vision for how enhanced digital vault technology will continue to evolve and transform the way financial firms manage their documentation and extract insights from client data?

Borghesan: The future of AI-powered Digital Vault technology is anchored in advanced querying and contextual analytics. Our team remains committed to actively innovating by building an environment to allow firms to not only securely store and manage documents but gain unprecedented access to meaningful (contextual) insights across the entire enterprise document ecosystem.

This next-gen shift is being driven by the convergence of advanced capabilities: private LLMs, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and vector-based databases. These technologies will enable firms to perform multi-document queries not only within a single client’s vault, but across all vaults organization-wide unlocking patterns, risk signals, and advice opportunities by making document data available and accessible, at scale.

We are essentially building a platform and ecosystem where advisors, compliance teams, and executives can ask complex, natural language questions: “Which clients have outdated KYC documents? Driver’s licenses? Insurance policies?” or “Where do we see underinsured HNW clients with expiring policies?” and receive real-time answers powered by AI with actionable insights and next step recommended actions.

To further fuel this intelligence, we are integrating both Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR). While OCR digitizes machine-printed text from scanned documents, ICR takes it further by accurately reading handwritten notes, advisor annotations, and client-filled forms. When combined with private LLMs, this creates a powerful foundation of fully digitized, structured, and searchable document data – no matter the source or format.

Last, but not least, we are heads down focused on making several enhancements to our real-time dashboarding, rolled-up vault analytics, predictive insights, and client nudges derived from document activity and metadata. This unlocks tremendous potential – from identifying compliance gaps proactively to enabling hyper-personalized, life-centric client advice based on legitimate sources of truth: the documents.

Hortz: What advice can you share on the key considerations or challenges that financial firms should keep in mind when implementing enhanced Digital Vault solutions?

Kenny: To preface this, it is worth mentioning that implementing an AI-powered Digital Vault goes well beyond updating your firm’s technology architecture – it is about augmenting your enterprise digital transformation and AI strategy. To get it right, just like adopting any platform or tool, firms must approach adoption with clarity, strategy, and execution in mind.

Here are some key considerations:

• Define the Why: Start with a clear strategic intent. Are you solving for compliance automation, enhancing client engagement, improving data access, or all of the above? Aligning the platform’s capabilities with specific business objectives ensures long-term success.
• Governance & Compliance Readiness: Financial documents are sensitive and regulated. A Digital Vault must enforce rigorous data governance, audit trails, encryption, and jurisdictional compliance (SEC 17a-4, FINRA, CIRO, etc.).
• Enterprise Integration: Ensure the solution plugs into your existing architecture – CRM, PMS, onboarding tools, and compliance systems – without disruption. True ROI comes from intelligent interoperability. And with the ability to extract data from documents and ingest the extracted data into CRMs, Data Lakes, or Planning Tools, it is critical to understand the downstream workflow capabilities as a result.
• User Enablement: Technology adoption depends on people. Equip advisors and staff with training, use cases, and workflows to promote usage and minimize friction. The best tech is the one that gets used.
• Scalability & Flexibility: Choose a platform that grows with you by adapting to new clients, new regulations, and emerging use cases across departments and geographies.

Bottom line – Do not treat a Digital Vault as just another repository. It is a massively important layer in your firm’s overall enterprise and client intelligence. And when implemented correctly, it can become a cornerstone of secure automation, actionable insight, and scalable growth.

This article was originally published here and is republished on Wealthtender with permission.

About the Author

Bill Hortz

Founder Institute for Innovation Development

Bill Hortz is an independent business consultant and Founder/Dean of the Institute for Innovation Development- a financial services business innovation platform and network. With over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry including expertise in sales/marketing/branding of asset management firms, as well as, creatively restructuring and developing internal/external sales and strategic account departments for 5 major financial firms, including OppenheimerFunds, Neuberger&Berman and Templeton Funds Distributors. His wide ranging experiences have led Bill to a strong belief, passion and advocation for strategic thinking, innovation creation and strategic account management as the nexus of business skills needed to address a business environment challenged by an accelerating rate of change.