Archive for February, 2012
What are the Most Common Applications for E-Signature Within Banks?
Monday, February 20th, 2012
Join us this Wednesday, February 22, for a one-hour webcast entitled, “The Top 5 E-Signature Trends in Banking” that will focus on the latest trends and best practices emerging within the banking sector. E-Signature adoption by banks has taken off in the past 18 months, largely driven by customer transformation initiatives and the pressure of increased regulatory and compliance requirements.
During this web seminar, we will take a deeper dive into questions like, “In what line-of-business areas are banks leveraging e-signatures?” Silanis has been tracking where banks are adding e-signatures to achieve the benefits of straight through processing (STP).
Foremost today is the focus on improving customer-facing processes within the branch. This includes account openings or onboarding for deposits and other daily retail banking activities. Some banks are starting with new client account openings as the baseline business process, while others are focused on using e-signatures when opening a credit card account with existing customers.
Another area of interest is the mortgage business, where delivery of disclosures is often the first process targeted for automation with e-signatures. Banks all over the US and Europe are focused on time-sensitive disclosures. There are best practices that have been outlined by SPeRS, the Standards and Procedures for Electronic Records and Signatures, ensuring that once the disclosure is delivered it is properly and prominently displaying the right information to the consumer.
While consumer lending has been a primary area of interest for banks, there are many other prime applications for e-signatures, including online banking and a bank’s mobile sales force. Webcast participants will benefit from the real-world insight Silanis has gained from our experience working with 4 of the top 10 North American banks, and dozens more banking and financial services leaders.
Reserve your webcast seat now.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events, Webcasts
Tags: Banking, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic banking, electronic loan processing, electronic signatures, Enterprise, Events, IT, loan, loan operations, Michael Laurie, operations, Silanis, Straight-through Processing
8 Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise E-Signatures – Part Eight
Wednesday, February 8th, 2012
Today we post the final segment of an 8-part interview with Mike Laurie, Silanis co-founder and VP of strategic planning. The purpose of this interview is to gain an industry insider’s view of the top criteria for evaluating enterprise e-signature solutions, and to understand how Silanis meets these criteria.
#8: The Stability of the Vendor
Q: Enterprise e-signatures, like any enterprise-class software, is a strategic technology with far-reaching implications. After all, this is an underpinning technology that reaches beyond the firewall to directly touch customers and automates revenue-generating business processes. Considering this importance, how can a company evaluate the stability of a solution provider in a market that is relatively young, with many start-ups or small firms relying on venture capital or even debt financing?
A: The most prudent way to proceed is by asking the right questions. Here are some suggestions.
If you consider record retention, how many years does your organization need to retain records? It is common in financial services, for example, to have 25-30 year archiving requirements. E-signed records are no different. Will your electronic signature provider be there when a signed document needs to be verified – or to help defend a transaction in dispute?
Is the vendor financially viable, will they be there to support you in the long term? To that point, Silanis has a strong financial position. We are happy to report that we closed the 2011 fiscal year having doubled revenue; the company is cash flow positive and is profitable.
How many years has the vendor been in business? As a pioneer in the e-signature space blazing trails more than 20 years ago, Silanis has garnered tremendous experience in helping organizations of all sizes migrate their business processes from paper to 100% electronic.
How healthy is the vendor’s customer base? Since the company was founded in 1992, our customer base has grown to include thousands of organizations. In the banking, lending and insurance industries alone, we process e-signatures for eight of North America’s top 15 insurance companies, four of the top banks in North America, and a number of the brand named auto and equipment vehicle financers. Between them, Silanis has helped automate virtually every type of internal and external process native to the financial services and insurance industries.
Silanis also is also the leading vendor of e-signature solutions in the US Federal and State government market. The GSA with its e-Offer and e-Mod contracting system, an enterprise license across 1.4 million US Army personnel and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) have proven the security, scalability and reliability of Silanis’ solutions. In fact, after more than 14 years using Silanis e-signatures, the JCS is still extending e-signing capabilities to new personnel.
Depending on your company and industry, ask yourself whether the vendor is focused only on one regional market? This may be important to multi-nationals, or even for companies with business relationships (suppliers or others) beyond North America. In our case, we have a number of international customers and partners. We work through resellers and sales agents in the UK, South Africa, Australia and Dubai, where customers in these and other jurisdictions have required us to become familiar with regional legislation and considerations. As an example, Silanis e-Sign Enterprise™ has gone through an internationalization process, which means that the product now has the ability to handle multi-byte characters used to display Chinese and other languages, should a customer require this type of development.
From a high level, I’ve provided a few examples of how vendor stability is important. If you have experience with enterprise software purchasing, what are some of your key recommendations? Are there any lessons learned that you’d like to share?
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Product News
Tags: Banking, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic loan processing, electronic signatures, Enterprise, Insurance, Michael Laurie, Requirements, Silanis, Stability, Straight-through Processing, Vendor
8 Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise E-Signatures – Part Seven
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Yesterday we posted the sixth segment of an 8-part interview with Mike Laurie, Silanis co-founder and VP of strategic planning. The purpose of this interview is to gain an industry insider’s view of the top criteria for evaluating enterprise e-signature solutions, and to understand how Silanis meets these criteria.
#7: Professional Services
Q: Lack of adequate professional services can greatly impact the success of an organization’s electronic signature implementation. What professional services are typically involved in Silanis’ customer implementations? How can you achieve the right balance between leveraging best practices and achieving autonomy?
A: In addition to the scope of services offered, organizations considering an enterprise license for e-signatures should look at the vendor’s implementation methodology, time-to-market track record and resources.
At Silanis, a professional services team of 20 supports customizing, implementing and deploying e-Sign Enterprise™. This includes custom project planning, development, consulting, testing, documentation, on-site deployment services, training and integration. We provide deployment support through the customer’s test/staging/QA process until the solution is live and in production.
Our implementation methodology gets projects fully deployed on schedule, on budget and on spec. It recently helped an insurance carrier go live in as little as two months. Given, each implementation is different and the complexity level varies depending on the project scope, integration within other systems, volume of transactions, etc.
Many of our enterprise deployments have involved a fully customized implementation, with large professional services teams working in various customer locations alongside the customer’s IT teams and external partners/vendors. As a result, Silanis’ professional services team has gained extensive experience with:
- Multi-channel remote and in-person e-signing processes
- E-Vaulting
- Integrating with other enterprise systems (CMS, DMS, BPM, etc.)
- Deploying hardware signature capture devices
- And much more
PART 8: To be posted tomorrow
Q: Enterprise e-signatures, like any enterprise-class platform, is a strategic initiative with far-reaching implications. After all, this is an underpinning technology that reaches beyond the firewall to directly touch customers and automate revenue-generating business processes. However, many e-signature vendors are small companies who face risk themselves by relying on venture capital or debt financing to fund ongoing operational losses. How stable is Silanis?
For more detailed information on the evaluation criteria for enterprise e-signatures as well as use case demos, access this free Silanis webcast recorded on January 25, 2012: 8-Point Checklist for Enterprise Electronic Signatures.
Categories: Customer News, In the News, Product News, Silanis Events
Tags: Banking, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Enterprise, loan operations, Michael Laurie, Platform, Professional Services, Silanis, Straight-through Processing
8 Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise E-Signatures – Part Six
Monday, February 6th, 2012
On Friday we posted the fifth segment of an 8-part interview with Mike Laurie, Silanis co-founder and VP of strategic planning. The purpose of this interview is to gain an industry insider’s view of the top criteria for evaluating enterprise e-signature solutions, and to understand how Silanis meets these criteria.
#6: Solution Accelerators
Q: What are solution accelerators, and why are they important?
A: The electronic signature market is mature enough that organizations expect to get up and running quickly. As a result of spending years helping companies and government agencies of all sizes automate their e-signature processes, patterns emerged. In fact, we tend to see commonality in workflows and page flows from one organization to the next. That’s why we took our experience in deploying e-signatures, and condensed it into a series of best practices templates.
A solution accelerator is therefore a pre-built, pre-tested template that fits a specific process so that you can use it to deploy quickly, with minimal impact on IT resources. Silanis’ flexible templates leverage lessons learned over years of building e-signature processes for online and point-of-sale use cases. In addition to workflows and page flows, the solution accelerators also include APIs, documentation and sample code. Many Silanis customers will use an accelerator to launch their first e-signature process and gather user feedback before customizing later on, to achieve an optimal customer experience.
Built for fast deployment, the solution accelerator offers basic e-sign process customization. It is possible to change the order of signers, number of signers, order of documents and/or number of documents.
Each solution accelerator also includes a pre-built layout for web pages. Your organization can customize the graphic interface that users see when they come to your web site to e-sign. You can insert a graphic image such as a logo, define the colors and fonts, or even use your own style sheet. In our experience, branding the signing session interface is critical for building trust in the online signing process.
PART 7: To be posted tomorrow
Q: Lack of adequate professional services can greatly impact the success of an organization’s implementation. What is Silanis’ view on the role of services? How much is enough, and what specifically should an organization look for?
For more detailed information on the evaluation criteria for enterprise e-signatures as well as use case demos, access this free Silanis webcast recorded on January 25, 2012: 8-Point Checklist for Enterprise Electronic Signatures.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Product News, Webcasts
Tags: Banking, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Enterprise, Michael Laurie, operations, Product, Silanis, Solution Accelerators, Straight-through Processing
8 Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise E-Signatures – Part Five
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
Yesterday we posted part four of an 8-part interview with Mike Laurie, Silanis co-founder and VP of strategic planning. The purpose of this interview is to gain an industry insider’s view of the top criteria for evaluating enterprise e-signature solutions, and to understand how Silanis meets these criteria.
#5: Enterprise Capability
Q: What does enterprise capability mean to you? How have your customers benefited from and leveraged Silanis’ enterprise capability?
A: Enterprise software can be distinguished from more general productivity tools, in that it touches an organization’s core, customer-facing business processes and it is leveraged by multiple departments, distribution channels and lines of business. When it comes to electronic signature solutions, organizations are moving away from stovepipe implementations and are adopting electronic signatures as a shared service across the enterprise.
This is the preferred approach for many reasons. Banks, insurers and other service providers are looking for ways to better service their customers across multiple channels. They are striving to achieve a seamless customer experience that delivers convenience and efficiency in the channel of the customer’s choice. Enterprise e-signatures make it possible to enable customer-facing transactions online, through call centers and in the field – in a consistent manner that fosters adoption and helps reduce compliance and legal risk. A single platform also has the obvious benefits of minimizing impact on IT staff, reducing total cost of ownership and making it faster to deploy and scale.
With the trend towards enterprise e-signatures, it is no surprise that many vendors will tout their enterprise capability. But it’s important to understand what this means and look for evidence of enterprise experience.
Silanis e-Sign Enterprise is being used today as a true enterprise platform. US Bank, 21st Century and others are leveraging the platform across multiple departments and processes. And going forward, these organizations now have the ability to scale across the enterprise with minimal development – while also providing the flexibility to fully define an optimal e-signature process and user experience for any type of transaction. Having one platform that scales and offers extensive flexibility lowers total cost-of-ownership and helps optimize the use of IT resources.
At a high level, consider how varied the needs might be for each line of business and each sales/service channel within your organization. It is simply not possible that a one-size-fits-all approach could ever meet all needs. The more options a solution offers, the easier it will be to scale to other processes, regardless of whether they be mediated, unmediated, third-party or internal.
Our customers need to implement in a shared environment. We are often asked, for example, if there is a way to separate department-specific customizations. The answer is: for sure! In our case, the platform runs as a shared service but also runs multiple versions of a process across different channels. For example, we have a customer that has automated new business insurance policy transactions running in real-time in three different channels, and to do that we had to support different customizations of the same business process.
More evidence of true enterprise capability can be found in the range of implementations among Silanis’ customers. Silanis solutions are being used in almost every possible configuration and scenario you would ever find in an organization: from low-risk internal approval processes to high-risk, customer-facing, legally enforceable, highly regulated transactions, through to the e-vaulting of transferable records. Name any signing requirement you have, and we will point to one of our customers doing exactly that. There is no other e-signature vendor with that breadth of experience. Customers can choose Silanis knowing that our solutions are already being used in the same way by other organizations.
PART 6: To be posted Monday, Feb. 6
Q: What are solution accelerators, and why are they important?
For more detailed information on the evaluation criteria for enterprise e-signatures as well as use case demos, access this free Silanis webcast recorded on January 25, 2012: 8-Point Checklist for Enterprise Electronic Signatures.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Product News, Webcasts
Tags: Banking, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic banking, electronic signatures, Enterprise Capability, Enterprise E-Signatures, Michael Laurie, operations, Silanis, Straight-through Processing
8 Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise E-Signatures – Part Four
Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Yesterday we posted the third of an 8-part interview with Michael Laurie, Silanis co-founder and VP of strategic planning. The purpose of this interview is to gain an industry insider’s view of the top criteria for evaluating enterprise e-signature solutions, and to understand how Silanis meets these criteria.
#4: Mobility
Q: What mobile devices can a consumer or field agent use to e-sign, e.g. smartphones, tablet PCs, laptops, etc.? What about signature capture pads? Why is mobile support important in an enterprise electronic signature platform?
The use of mobile devices is changing consumer behaviour. There are more mobile phones now than cars or credit cards. More than 80% of adults in the US alone own one; half are smartphones that can carry out electronic transactions and are able to capture electronic signatures.
Lightweight tablet PCs are ideal for mobile e-signing.
E-signatures are essential for automating customer-facing transactions and therefore need to be included in an organization’s mobile strategy. Combining e-signatures with mobile devices provides a convenient method of presenting documents to clients during face-to-face meetings. Think of insurance or financial services agents visiting customers – they need to be able to close business regardless of whether they are at a kitchen table or in a 30-storey skyscraper. This is currently the most common use of mobile e-signing in North America, through agents who use wireless devices like an iPad to close business on the road. Tablet PCs are in fact ideal for mobile e-signing. Due to the size of the display, regulated documents and contracts can be presented on-screen to the consumer in a web browser, in accordance with compliance requirements.
The pervasiveness of mobile devices is creating new opportunities to automate consumer signing transactions, and making possible options never before available. For example:
- Mobile phones can provide additional user authentication and signer attribution evidence. A one-time password can be generated and sent to signers via their mobile phone, or a consumer can easily use their smartphone to take/upload a photo of a piece of ID in real time to corroborate their identity.
- With mobile devices it is possible to enable a hybrid electronic-paper process, if required. Consider a scenario where a consumer expressly requests a paper copy to review prior to e-signing, since not everyone will be comfortable viewing documents on a small screen. Even though the signer is reading a paper copy, they may still use their mobile device to e-sign the electronic equivalent of that paper document so as to ensure the process continues to move forward quickly and efficiently through downstream steps. (The only truly limiting factor with regards to mobility, and especially smartphones, is screen real estate. For certain processes it may not be possible to meet compliance requirements with regards to displaying information correctly.)
- Silanis has already begun innovating with e-signature transaction analytics and mobility in ways that transcend conventional reporting, not only to improve customer experience, but also to introduce predictive capabilities. According to Forrester Research, by 2020 the majority of e-signature transactions will be launched from mobile devices . As an example, people will be able to submit insurance claims immediately on-site where an accident occurs. They will take photos and video of the damage, upload a photo of their driver’s license or even record their voice, and bring all required information into the signing process immediately, so that claims payouts can happen sooner.
PART 5: To be posted tomorrow
Q: What can you point to as evidence of enterprise capability? How is the Silanis platform being used as an enterprise solution, meaning in a scenario where multiple business units are leveraging it as a shared service?
For more detailed information on the evaluation criteria for enterprise e-signatures as well as use case demos, access this free Silanis webcast recorded on January 25, 2012: 8-Point Checklist for Enterprise Electronic Signatures.
Categories: Customer News, In the News, Industry Insights, Product News, Webcasts
Tags: Banking, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic banking, electronic signatures, Insurance, iPad, Michael Laurie, Mobile, Mobility, operations, Silanis, Straight-through Processing, Tablet
8 Criteria for Evaluating Enterprise E-Signatures – Part Three
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Yesterday we posted the second of an 8-part interview with Michael Laurie, Silanis co-founder and VP of strategic planning. The purpose of this interview is to gain an industry insider’s view of the top criteria for evaluating enterprise electronic signature solutions, and to understand how Silanis meets these criteria.
#3: Electronic Evidence
Q: What is electronic evidence? How much is enough to ensure that electronic records will be enforced in the event of a dispute?
A: Businesses are moving more and more of their customer transactions onto the web. Essentially they are doing business with consumers in a completely electronic, paperless environment where contracts and documents of all types are being delivered, reviewed and signed. When automating consumer-facing processes, the challenge is to do so without introducing risk. Evidentiary rules and contract principles apply to electronic transactions in the same way they do in the paper world. Therefore the electronic version of the process has to be at least as strong as it was on paper. Silanis helps mitigate risk of repudiation by providing substantially more evidence than was ever possible with paper.
In both cases, producing convincing evidence entails more than just presenting an authentic signed record of an agreement. In fact, the goal is to demonstrate that the process used to establish the signer’s intent was fair, and complied with all applicable laws and regulations.
The key is to record and be able to prove the exact process used to build the signer’s understanding of what they were agreeing to and signing. This includes reliably reproducing the appearance and order of all of the web screens, documents and legal disclosures that were presented to the signer; the time spent on each page; and all actions each signer took during the review and signing process, such as clicking on buttons to accept, sign, initial and confirm. Simply having log files of what happened is not enough.
Within the Silanis platform, electronic evidence is captured by the Silanis Process Reviewer™ and is uniquely linked to the final e-signed documents so that it can be reliably reproduced afterwards as needed. Reproducing evidence of an electronic transaction that occurred several years back can be a daunting task. An enterprise e-signature platform makes the process of e-Discovery easier, more reliable and less expensive.
In the case that an electronic record is actually a negotiable instrument like a mortgage note or chattel paper, the Silanis e-Vault Manager™ protects electronic records throughout their lifetime as ownership is transferred between various parties and vaults with the assurance that they are the authoritative copies; that is, the electronic originals. It also ensures legal control of the transferable records during creation, storage and transfer by: (a) maintaining a single authoritative copy of the record which is unique and identifiable; (b) allowing only the secured party or its designated custodian to transfer, store, or change the identified assignee of the authoritative copy; (c) assuring the record cannot be altered, except as permitted, and identifying unauthorized revisions and non-authoritative copies.
PART 4: To be posted tomorrow
Q: What mobile devices can a consumer or field agent use to e-sign, e.g. smartphones, tablet PCs, laptops, etc.? Does Silanis also support hardware signature capture pads? Why is mobile support important in an enterprise e-signature solution?
For more detailed information on the evaluation criteria for enterprise e-signatures as well as use case demos, access this free Silanis webcast recorded on January 25, 2012: 8-Point Checklist for Enterprise Electronic Signatures.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Webcasts
Tags: Banking, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic banking, Electronic Evidence, electronic signatures, Enterprise, Events, Francois Leblanc, Insurance, Michael Laurie, Process, Silanis, Silanis e-Vault Manager, Silanis Process Reviewer, Straight-through Processing
