BoardVantage review by Inspector Jones

The original Boardvantage product, Boardvantage Director, targets company directors, ensuring they can meet their board duties as easily as possible, despite an ever-increasing list of requirements and expectations that they face.

Boardvantage offer a a second product, Boardvantage MeetX which takes a more radical approach to handling meeting documents, with a more graphical interface and a greater emphasis on providing relevant documents and information to executives, rather than just directors. In distinguishing between their two products, Boardvantage considers traditional boards prefer the look and feel of Boardvantage Director, whereas more tech-savvy boards opt for MeetX because of the increased productivity that comes with its task-driven qualities.

Boardvantage takes great pleasure in claiming that their products are used by 60 of the Fortune 100 companies, half of the Fortune 500 companies, and by 1500 companies in total.

Boardvantage Director is a board portal product, designed to automate the dissemination of company documents to directors, as well as enabling directors to do a number of regular tasks, such as voting and e-signing consents.

The aim of Boardvantage Director is to enable boards to go totally paperless. Documents needed for board meetings, even last-minute ad hoc ones, can easily be assembled together by company secretary staff, and pushed to directors’ computers and iPads. Particularly sensitive documents can sit in electronic ‘briefcases’ on the directors’ devices, which are encrypted and secured.

It is designed to ensure that company directors meet the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. This includes the requirement for company secretaries to centrally purge a number of necessary documents from all of the directors’ devices (even from their electronic briefcases) at the end of each quarter.

One major usability advance that Boardvantage has made has been to enable company directors to receive and work with their board documents on iPads. This has meant that directors have been able to work with their documents just as if they were reading and annotating an eBook.

The document delivery is not just one-way. Board directors do not simply get board documents to read. They can make notes and annotations, which in turn can be viewed both by the secretarial staff and by fellow board members. Indeed board members can fully collaborate and edit documents, and there is version control as well as notification settings built into the software.

To assist with this board collaboration, Boardvantage Director provides fully secure messaging and emailing.

Security is indeed of major importance (as there would be, of course, major ramifications if there was insufficient security). Company secretaries can easily determine who has access to particular documents, both at an individual level, or by groups. They still have God-mode access to both add and purge documents centrally.

Companies can choose whether they keep their data stored on-site or whether they use hosting at a highly secure site. Boardvantage have secure data centres in California, New Jersey, Amsterdam and Singapore. The platform is protected by full strength encryption and multi-factor authentication.

As directors can access and modify their documents both online and offline there is automatic synchronization whenever the iPad or computer is within wi-fi range. This means that there is effectively constant, incremental back-up when you are online. There is also a separate daily back-up done.

Boardvantage Director is definitely aimed at company boards who are willing to move on from the paper-based systems used in the past. Judging by their number of Fortune 500 customers, there are clearly many boards who accept the advantages of a paperless system and are willing to operate electronically in practice.