Inside Financial Services at Egnyte’s Global Summit: What Leaders Told Us
This year’s Egnyte Global Summit carried a clear theme: “Where AI Accelerates Mission-Critical Content.” It was a fitting backdrop for the Financial Services Roundtable, where leaders across wealth management, private equity, banking, and insurance met to discuss how their firms navigate collaboration, intelligence, and governance today.
I’m going to share insights from the notes I captured during those roundtable discussions, the individual conversations I had throughout the event, and the perspectives generously shared by other participants. And in the spirit of the summit’s theme, I used Egnyte’s AI to help accelerate and synthesize those collective insights into a clearer, more actionable narrative—one of the core use cases firms are looking to add in their own workflows. (Read to the end to see the prompt and process I used.)
What emerged wasn’t a list of hypothetical trends, but a grounded snapshot of what financial firms are truly prioritizing: simplifying daily work, reducing workflow friction, adopting AI with intention, and modernizing governance without adding burden.
Here’s what leaders told us—and what your firms can do with those insights moving forward.
Collaboration: Desktop-Native Workflows Remain the Powerhouse
One of the strongest points of consensus across firms was the continued dominance of desktop and mapped letter drive usage as the preferred way to work. In fact, 80+% of firms access and work on content via desktop applications.
The reason?
It’s not just because that’s how it’s always been done (although that’s part of the reason). It’s because only the desktop versions of Microsoft 365 applications, such as Excel and Word, offer the full features and capabilities firms require.
At Egnyte, we’ve heard this from countless analysts, advisors, underwriters, and operations teams, so we’ve continued adding features that are available via desktop. We’re incredibly proud that this won us the Datos Insights Desktop Experience award.
As one private equity leader put it: “We’ve got Excel files with hundreds of thousands of rows and thousands of reference links—we literally have to use the desktop. Excel on the web doesn’t offer all the functionality like macros or keyboard shortcuts, and if you move or rename just one of those files, it turns into hours of fixes. But not with Egnyte.”
Another echoed the importance of familiarity: “The letter drive is huge for us. It feels like the shared drive we’ve had for 20 years—except it actually syncs and behaves.”
Leaders emphasized several advantages:
Native desktop editing for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint
Mapped letter drive like a traditional network drive (no VPN required)
Reliable performance with model-heavy spreadsheets
Secure sharing without the need for email attachments
Smooth co-editing with no duplication or version collisions
Automatic version control with no user effort
This combination— Egnyte Desktop App + letter drive—has become the collaboration backbone across financial services. It lets teams stay in the tools they already know while benefiting from Egnyte’s governance and security on the back end.
Firms were also excited to explore the latest updates to the Desktop App, which bring Ask via AI (the ability to run an AI prompt for a specific document), eSignature, workflow triggers, and more directly to Windows Explorer and Mac Finder menus.
Where collaboration adoption varied wasn’t tied to the product itself, but to standardized and communicated best practices across the firm. Departments that offer simple onboarding and ongoing training see consistent, mature usage. Those who don’t often fall back on long-standing saving/sharing habits purely out of habit.
Another topic of conversation was the other critical tools across financial services workflows, whether that’s a CRM, custodian, or eSignature tool. Firms had a strong desire for a more connected ecosystem, which Egnyte continues to build.
A few examples include our native integration with Salesforce and, for those not using Egnyte Sign, DocuSign, and Adobe Sign. I’ll explain more about the trend line toward simplicity over complexity later, but the key takeaway at this point is that firms desire native integrations to reduce steps, clicks, and the need to switch platforms in their workflows.
Connect the Tools, Clarify the Path, Accelerate the Work
To strengthen collaboration, firms should stop relying on habit and instead formalize a desktop-native workflow process. That starts with clearly defining how documents should move through the organization—from opening files in the letter drive, to editing in native apps, to sharing via Egnyte links. This removes ambiguity and eliminates sprawl caused by ad-hoc saving and email attachments.
Firms should also provide simple, scenario-based training that reflects real financial services tasks. Teams adopt what they understand, not what they’re told to memorize.
Finally, firms should lean into native integrations across CRM, custodians, and eSignature platforms. When Egnyte becomes the connective tissue between these tools, teams spend less time switching contexts and more time executing the real work.
In short, collaboration becomes faster and easier to govern (more on that later) when firms intentionally standardize the workflow, not just the tool.
Intelligence (AI): High Enthusiasm, Clear Interest, and a Need for Tangible Starting Points
Every firm expressed a strong desire to adopt AI meaningfully. But they want AI that solves real problems inside their existing workflows—not AI for the sake of AI.
As one participant put it: “We’re not trying to reinvent workflows. We just want AI to shave off the parts of the job that no one should still be doing manually.”
Another added: “We can’t push content out to some unsecure external AI playground. If intelligence isn’t inside the repository, it’s a non-starter.”
But one thing was clear about AI. Nearly everyone acknowledged their teams were using it, whether or not the firm had approved its use. This is especially concerning for data privacy (more on that in the governance section), and a serious shift in technology adoption. For what may be the first time, knowledge workers are pushing for the adoption of new tools because they recognize the value for their roles.
The need for secure, embedded AI aligns naturally with Egnyte’s approach to embedded intelligence—bringing AI to the content and offering MCP server capabilities and intelligent agents that connect to other AI offerings and essential business systems.
Firms immediately recognized real-value use cases:
Document summarization
Extracting key financial or risk indicators
Auto-generating metadata
Detecting content patterns at scale
Reducing manual review
Organizing content proactively
The common desire: intelligence that accelerates the work employees already do, without creating new fragmentation, new applications, or new compliance exposure.
Channel AI Excitement Into Real Productivity
Firms need to channel the energy around AI. Not only does it increase employee satisfaction by eliminating the drudgery of manual tasks, but it also increases firm productivity, capacity, and speed-to-revenue.
How do you do it?
Start with small, targeted workflows where AI can reduce manual effort—review, summarization, classification, or initial data extraction. Let AI augment the work, not reinvent it. And, embed AI directly in the content layer to minimize risk and maximize adoption.
Governance: IT and Compliance Are Moving Toward Shared Ownership
Governance generated some of the most candid exchanges of the day. Firms face increasing pressure around access control, policy adherence, and compliance readiness—but the distribution of responsibilities is still evolving.
One remark captured the tension: “Compliance wants more control, but IT doesn’t want them clicking around in the backend. There has to be a middle path.”
Another added optimism about automation: “If we can automate just half the permission reviews, that’s months of effort saved.”
Shared ownership is becoming the new normal:
Compliance is defining more policies
IT is automating more controls
Business leaders are owning more permission decisions
Governance guardrails matter more than ever
This shift in ownership was especially clear with regard to AI safeguards. The biggest concerns of all stakeholders, from IT to owners and especially compliance, are the data security risks of using public AI models that ingest and train on a firm's data, which then has the potential to become a response to someone’s prompt in the future.
The best practice, and Egnyte’s response, is to provide responses based on the content a user does or doesn’t have access to. Here’s an example relating to prompting about client information, with each user asking the same question:
1. Operations team lead: Detailed response, given they have full access to client files
2. Operations associate: Detailed response, given the client was assigned to this associate
3. Marketing: No answer, since they don’t have access to any client files
Recent updates give further control at the admin level, beyond just a user’s current access.
It’s best described in this quote from a CTO: “Our compliance team may hug you.”
This shift to a more distributed model reduces bottlenecks, improves governance, and aligns decisions to business context—but only when supported by good tooling and clear guardrails.
Shared Rules. Clear Roles. Stronger Control
Adopt a shared governance framework. Compliance defines the rules. IT implements them with automation. Business leaders manage access decisions with oversight through reviews, insights, and audit trails. And, ensure you’ve provided access to AI tools that work for users while giving your firm the control it needs. This approach strengthens governance while reducing operational burden.
The Industry Trendline: Toward Fewer Tools and More Unified Workflows
Across all discussions, leaders expressed a desire for clarity, not complexity. They want fewer tools, fewer touchpoints, and more consistency.
As two leaders summarized it:
“We don’t need more tools. We need the tools we have to work together without drama.”
“The firms that are winning aren’t the ones with the most software—they’re the ones with the clearest workflows.”
What firms ultimately want is a unified experience:
One platform for collaboration
One access point to connect content and AI tools of choice
One governed source of truth
One integrated end-to-end workflow for core business processes
Egnyte is increasingly that unifying layer—not by replacing everything, but by anchoring the mission-critical content workflows that financial services firms depend on.
Closing Reflection
The Financial Services Roundtable reinforced something essential: The future of financial services isn’t about collecting more tools—it’s about creating more clarity. By strengthening collaboration practices, embracing targeted AI, and evolving governance models thoughtfully, firms can accelerate the work that matters without compromising control.
This blog—built from conversation notes, shared insights, and AI-assisted synthesis—reflects exactly the type of acceleration firms now seek: moving faster with more confidence, more consistency, and more intelligence.
Egnyte remains committed to supporting that journey, grounded in real dialogue and real workflows that shape the future of financial services.
If you missed the summit, watch the replays from some of the sessions.
How I Got Here …
As promised at the beginning of this post, here’s the process I followed to get to this point.
1. Source material: I created a folder in Egnyte with all of my collected notes. I also included a past blog I wrote, so there was an example of my voice and the format I was looking for.
2. Selection: I then selected all of the files that contained those notes.
3. Prompt: Next, I gave Egnyte Copilot this prompt:
“I would like you to write a post-event blog that will go on Egnyte.com from the financial services round table conversations that happened at Egnyte’s Global Summit, as well as conversations that were had individually.
It’s being authored by me, John T. Jones, the financial services strategist at Egnyte. It should be around 1500 words and be broken into sections with headers, and include some actionable steps for readers. Use the sample blog for tone of voice and structure. The sections should be tied to Egnyte’s core pillars of collaboration, intelligence, and governance.
Please use only the selected content as the source material to create the blog and insert relevant quotes as applicable.”
4. Iterations: I had a decent first draft and gave further prompts to update some of the section headers and a little more of the structure.
5. Edits: I then spent around 30 minutes reading through and editing.
This same practice could be followed to write a follow-up to a client or partner meeting, summarizing analyst reports, and more.
Pick the source material. Provide an example. Write the prompt. Fine-tune the output. Publish.
