Filehaven: A secure communication portal for you and your contacts

Filehaven is an invitation based, encrypted communication web portal which is marketed as an alternative to email. The platform is comparable to Facebook owned WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage as it offers real-time messaging and military grade encryption.

The platform is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which has been approved by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

The tools offer a slick user interface and once users get around that it is an alternative to email, it is fairly simple to use.

Filehaven is constantly evolving and includes a community feature which allows users to suggest improvements for the system such as mobile applications, document signing and video conferencing.

Strengths

• Filehaven provides real-time messaging with the ability to create conversation that includes multiple participants or about a particular subject matter.
• It’s now possible to include as many contacts on a conversation as you like.
• Smart notifications and alerts – Filehaven collates all missed activities into a simple digest email for users and/or their clients.
• Filehaven has been engineered on the Amazon AWS platform and hosts its entire network from Amazon’s London datacentre.
• Third-party services used for the real-time broadcasting of messages operate from within the EU but don’t persist any of the data sent.
• Filehaven contains a handy General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) feature which allows all client data to be downloaded and removed from main data base by companies.
• Filehaven community – individuals get access to Filehaven’s roadmaps and have the ability to submit feature requests and vote on requests that have been submitted.
• Filehaven can be accessed on multiple devices in a similar way to iMessage and conversations can be picked up from where they were stopped.
• A free add-on that allows firms to setup a private “Dropbox” style shared folder with individual clients. Perfect for things like policy documents etc.
• Improved branding options to control the colours used throughout the site
• Military grade encryption.

Scope for improvement

• Not available on email as it is an alternative to email – companies will have to agree to do things differently.
• Invitation based system: Clients have to create an account to use – the platform is only available once a client has a log in.
• Doesn’t have a mobile application and is only available on the web.
• Limited integrations – looking at potential third-party tools that could be integrated with its API to streamline communications and file sharing.