Syncrony Offers Boardcloud Board Management Software For Better Board Meeting Governance

Syncrony Digital, the software development firm behind the BoardCloud board meeting management platform, has released a complete rewrite of its board portal software. It's the most significant update to the product since BoardCloud first went into production in 2016, and it lands at a moment when boards everywhere are rethinking how they handle governance, security, and remote participation.

The rebuild touches nearly every part of the platform used by company secretaries, directors, committee members, and the IT teams who support them: a redesigned drag-and-drop agenda builder, a universal board pack reader that works on any existing device, and tighter controls around attendance, voting, and document revisions. Below, we break down what changed, why it matters, and how it fits into the broader shift toward digital board governance.

What Is a Board Portal, and Why Is the Market Growing So Fast?

A board portal is a secure software platform that centralizes the documents, scheduling, and communication a board of directors needs to prepare for, run, and follow up on meetings. Instead of emailing PDFs or printing paper board books, directors log into a portal to read materials, vote on resolutions, and review meeting history.

Demand for these platforms has grown substantially over the past several years. Verified Market Research valued the global board portal software market at roughly $2.85 billion in 2023 and projects it will reach $5.64 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of about 17%. Analysts attribute the growth to two forces: organizations replacing paper-based governance processes with digital ones, and tightening regulatory scrutiny that makes auditable, secure recordkeeping a necessity rather than a nice-to-have.

BoardCloud has been part of that shift since it was first built for the Fidelity Security Group's company secretary and CFO in 2016. Syncrony Digital, which was founded in 1999, rewrote the platform from scratch during the pandemic, releasing a rebuilt version on the .NET Core framework in 2021 before layering in the drag-and-drop agenda builder and, now, this latest release.

Inside the Rewrite: A New Agenda Builder for Company Secretaries

From a company secretary's perspective, the headline feature is a rebuilt agenda builder — the tool used to organize meeting topics, attach supporting materials, and structure the flow of a board meeting.

The new version can ingest Microsoft Office documents, images, and PDFs directly into an agenda via drag-and-drop, and it can populate an entire agenda template automatically by reading a structured ZIP archive. That second capability matters for secretaries running recurring meeting types (quarterly board meetings, standing committees) who would otherwise rebuild the same structure by hand every cycle.

Alongside the agenda builder, the release adds:

Attendance recording that logs who joined a meeting and when, supporting the attendance register requirements many governance frameworks call for
Electronic voting tied directly to agenda items and resolutions
Revision management, so every edit to a document or agenda is tracked rather than living in a chain of emailed "final_v3" attachments

Taken together, these features build on what an audit trail is meant to do: create a defensible, time-stamped record of who did what, and when, across the life of a meeting.

One Board Pack Reader, Built for Every Device

Board and committee members get a new integrated board pack reader — the tool directors actually use to read and annotate meeting materials. Syncrony Digital designed it to be usable by non-technical board members without training, since not every director is comfortable with specialized software.

CEO Dr. Howard Rybko says the redesign was informed directly by problems the company ran into with earlier native reader apps:

"We learned some lessons from our previous efforts to roll out iOS and Android reader apps for board members. Often adoption by boards is delayed because IT has to buy new tablets for the board pack reader app to be loaded on. This becomes a logistical nightmare, fraught with procurement, app loading, and device distribution issues."

Instead of another native app, BoardCloud built a responsive reader that loads on whatever device a director is already using, once they've authenticated. That sidesteps the procurement cycle entirely: no new tablets to buy, image, and ship to directors scattered across different locations.

The timing lines up with a real operational pain point. As hybrid and remote work have become permanent fixtures rather than pandemic-era exceptions — Gallup data reported by WorkTime shows 52% of U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs now work a hybrid schedule and another 27% work fully remote — IT departments are managing far more distributed hardware than they used to. That shows up directly in support data: Fixify's 2026 IT Help Desk Benchmark Report found that hardware and security tickets spike at highly distributed organizations, in part because when a remote worker's device fails, there's no on-site IT desk to step in and fix it on the spot.

For board support specifically, that dynamic is magnified: directors are rarely W-2 employees on the corporate device-management program, which is exactly the population a bring-your-own-device, browser-based reader is built to serve.

Governance Compliance for the Work-From-Home Era

Beyond convenience, Rybko frames the release as a governance and compliance play. "In today's work-from-home environment, BoardCloud is the perfect tool to enforce board meeting governance," he says. "We have crafted systems that produce almost-automatic compliance with attendance, vote tracking, and document revision management requirements."

That framing responds to a well-documented gap in how boards actually communicate. A board meeting governance framework is only as strong as the channels directors actually use day to day, and those channels are frequently less secure than boards assume. In a Forrester Consulting study commissioned by Diligent Corporation, reported by Business Wire, 87% of surveyed firms said they were concerned about the security of board communications and data sharing — yet 55% of board members admitted they still used personal email for board business anyway. The same study found that at the time, roughly two-thirds of North American boards operated without any board portal software at all.

That gap between stated concern and actual practice is part of why "almost-automatic compliance," as Rybko puts it, is a meaningful design goal rather than a marketing phrase. If attendance, voting, and revision history are captured as a byproduct of how the platform works — rather than something a secretary has to manually assemble after the fact — there's less room for the kind of email-based workarounds that create audit gaps. PwC's Governance Insights Center has separately noted that keeping pace with digital transformation is one of the factors executives say limits board effectiveness, which is exactly the kind of gap purpose-built governance software is meant to close.

A SaaS Platform Built to Scale, From Free Trials to Enterprise

The features above run on what Syncrony Digital describes as a multi-tenant SaaS platform — a cloud-based delivery model where a single, centrally maintained application serves many customer organizations at once, each with its own isolated data.

"We are super proud of the SAAS multi-tenant platform we have built to house apps like BoardCloud," Rybko says. "Our new SAAS system allows us to offer a fully functional, free one-month trial for any company or non-profit... This means that any organization or business can benefit from the technology, as long as it has a board." Organizations interested in testing the platform can request a free board portal trial directly from Syncrony Digital.

Larger organizations with stricter data residency or infrastructure requirements aren't left out: Syncrony Digital also offers a cloud-hosted or on-premise enterprise edition of BoardCloud, aimed at companies that need the platform to run inside their own infrastructure rather than a shared multi-tenant environment.

Key Takeaways

Syncrony Digital has released a complete rewrite of its BoardCloud board portal, the biggest update since the product launched in 2016.
A new drag-and-drop agenda builder imports Microsoft Office files, images, and PDFs, and can auto-populate an agenda from a structured ZIP archive.
New attendance recording, electronic voting, and revision management features are designed to create an automatic audit trail rather than a manually assembled one.
Instead of native iOS/Android reader apps that required IT to procure and distribute new devices, BoardCloud now uses a responsive reader that loads on whatever device a board member already has, after authentication.
CEO Dr. Howard Rybko positions the release as a governance and compliance tool for hybrid and remote boards, addressing a documented gap between how secure boards believe their communications are and how they actually communicate.
The platform runs on a multi-tenant SaaS model with a free one-month trial for any company or nonprofit, alongside a cloud-hosted or on-premise option for larger enterprises.

Sources

02 Jul 2021

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BoardCloud USA Editor

United States BoardCloud Editor.