Solving a Problem We Never Knew Could Exist

We need something to share our project files with all our stakeholders.

When we heard this in our first meeting with Finager Fintech, my first question was “can’t you just use Google Drive?”

Within a few minutes, I realized that I was dead wrong. And we also realized that there might be problems we don’t even know need solving.

The problem

Finager Fintech, as its name suggests, works mainly with finances in high value projects. For any project they are involved in, they need to share documents that are highly confidential, among the stakeholders. Most of the virtual disk providers (i.e. Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive) don’t consider such use cases. In fact, they would probably love to use the data of these confidential files to train their AI or improve their ad experience.

Finager needed a simple thing - an app that feels like Drive, works like Drive, is secure and can track every file being moved around.

Yet the task is not that simple. You need to have a great UI/UX, process files, show them in the browser, handle untrusted files safely, keep things fast and so on.

As they were about to begin a new project involving more than 10 stakeholders - including a few banks, Finager wanted us to build such an app for them, within a very short time limit.

What we built

To a regular user, we built just another file sharing app - where Finager could upload their files, organize them into folders and share them with the stakeholders. You can open PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets, slides, images, videos and even engineering drawings, right in the browser. You don’t need to download them or install any extra software to view them.

But as we learned in that first meeting, being able to share files was only a part of the problem; the smallest part in fact. Each stakeholder needed access to different documents. We made it possible to give access to an entire group, e.g. a bank and its people, at once. If someone doesn’t have access to a file, they wouldn’t even know that it exists. Trying to open it with a direct link doesn’t help either.

Then there was the question of what happens after someone opens a document. We added watermarks with the person’s name, organization and an ID to each page they view or download. Each individual gets their own copy and the benchmark says that user can view a file within 800ms of clicking ‘open’. The app also keeps an immutable ledger of every view, download and failed attempt to access a file.

We also had to be careful with the files themselves. Showing a file in the browser often means processing it on the server first, and you can’t assume every uploaded file is safe. So we kept that processing isolated, without internet access or access to the confidential files stored elsewhere in the app.

Finally, we added notifications for things that might need attention - someone downloading a lot of files at once, downloading at unusual hours or repeatedly trying to open files they don’t have access to. The admins get notified and decide what to do. Documents also have sensitivity levels, from General to Strictly confidential, which decide who gets notified when a document is opened and how quickly.

What was achieved

Within a few weeks, Finager had an app they could use to share confidential documents for their project. They could manage access for the different stakeholders, see who viewed or downloaded a file and look into unusual activity. If a copy was shared outside the project, the watermark could help them trace whose copy it was.

For us, this was a problem we wouldn’t have thought about if we hadn’t worked with Finager. I still think “can’t you just use Google Drive?” was a reasonable question to ask. But now I understand why, for some projects, the answer is no.