Enterprise banks evaluating secure document exchange platforms face a deceptively simple question:
Should we create a vault (or drawer) for every client upfront?
A widely adopted best practice among mature institutions is to:
Provision vaults and drawers just-in-time, and focus architectural effort on entitlement governance and access control.
Vault creation is easy. Entitlement design is hard.
In this post, we’ll explore:
Why banks avoid pre-provisioning client vaults
How drawers become entitlement boundaries across business lines
The access control patterns that succeed in production
Platforms like SideDrawer provide a clear hierarchical container model for structuring client information:
Client Filing Cabinet – the conceptual root of the client’s secure document space
Tenant / Line of Business Context – wealth, insurance, commercial, etc.
Drawer – a governed workspace scoped to a business line or relationship type
Tile / Record Type – structured categories such as Statements, Tax, Lending
Record (Folder) – a specific workflow artifact (e.g., “John’s RRSP Q4 2022”)
Files + Metadata + Collaborators – the operational access boundary
The diagram below illustrates this structure clearly:
From an API and orchestration perspective, provisioning these components is operationally straightforward:
Create or reuse the client container
Create an appropriate line-of-business drawer
Attach collaborators based on policy
Trigger downstream workflows (forms, reminders, routing)
Technically, this can happen in seconds. But enterprise banks do not optimize for speed.
They optimize for:
Regulatory scope
Operational burden
Entitlement risk
Audit exposure
This is why leading institutions avoid pre-provisioning containers for all clients and instead adopt just-in-time provisioning triggered by governed workflows.
Enterprise banks do not create vaults simply because a client record exists in a CRM. They create them when a specific workflow, in a specific business line, requires a controlled environment for document exchange.
| Workflow Context | Trigger Event | Provisioning Action | Access + Governance Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Wealth & Advisor-Led Engagements
|
An advisor initiates secure document collection inside a CRM widget
|
- Reuse or create the client container
- Create a wealth-specific drawer with deterministic metadata
- Apply standardized folder/record templates
|
Access is assigned based on advisor role, branch policies, and book-of-business entitlements.
Most institutions enforce one wealth drawer per client per LOB, programmatically.
|
|
Business Banking Onboarding
|
A banker triggers a “Create Digital Vault” workflow during onboarding
|
- Check for existing client container
- Add a commercial drawer if one exists
- Otherwise provision a new container + drawer
|
Collaborator roles are assigned based on customer vs prospect status, ensuring onboarding entitlements are scoped and auditable.
|
|
Prospect & New-to-Bank Journeys
|
A prospect submits an invitation or intake form
|
- Create vault/container if not present
- Provision an onboarding-tagged drawer
- Trigger smart forms, reminders, and workflow follow-ups
|
External access is typically time-bound and restricted, with contributor permissions governed by onboarding state and compliance policy.
|
The key principle is consistent:
Vaults and drawers are created only when a regulated workflow justifies their existence — not because a party record exists elsewhere.
This reduces unused containers and ensures entitlements emerge only when business context requires them.
For large institutions, a client vault is not simply storage. It is the entitlement boundary spanning the client’s engagements across multiple business lines.
A typical high-net-worth client vault may have drawers such as:
Wealth Advisory · Direct Investing · Private Banking · Insurance · Trust & Estate
| Client Experience | Employee Experience | Bank Governance Reality |
|---|---|---|
| One unified digital vault | Only entitled drawers appear by default | Segmented drawers by line of business |
| Seamless collaboration | Guided workflows aligned to role and context | IAM-driven entitlement enforcement |
| Simple document exchange | Clear routing into the correct governed container | Information barriers + audit readiness |
This model enables:
Clear segregation by business line
Need-to-know access enforcement
Controlled collaboration without cross-LOB leakage
Across institutions, several architecture patterns emerge consistently.
All while preserving:
Documents
Audit history
Traceability between source and surviving containers
Enterprise buyers are not primarily concerned with UI-level convenience features.
They are concerned with:
Preventing cross-LOB leakage
Meeting regulatory obligations across repositories
Supporting audit cycles (who had access, when, and why)
Automated access revocation tied to workflow state
Avoiding privilege creep over time
The challenge is architecting entitlements so that provisioning is deterministic, governed, and audit-ready.
The strongest deployments converge on a consistent model:
Just-in-time vault and drawer creation
One client container, one drawer per line of business
Role- and LOB-mapped access encoded in IAM and orchestration
Segmentation controls enforced in both UI and API
Lifecycle ownership aligned to retention and deactivation policies
Full auditability of provisioning, overrides, and entitlement changes
Platforms like SideDrawer provide the structural elements:
Client containers
LOB-specific drawers
Role-based collaboration
APIs for real-time provisioning
Integrations with CRM, IAM, and enterprise content systems
But at enterprise scale, success depends far more on entitlement governance:
Design the entitlement model per line of business, codify it across systems, and let just-in-time provisioning follow from those rules.
That is where the real enterprise complexity lives and where the most meaningful value is delivered.