Archive for the ‘Industry Insights’ Category
Real-world use case demonstrations for the insurance industry
Thursday, May 10th, 2012
At the upcoming 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance in NYC on May 31, Silanis will present two practical 30-minute demonstrations, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, to walk through best practices for in-person and remote e-signing, as well as for managing e-transactions.
Use Case Demonstration #1
Best practices for in-person and remote e-signing
With so many options for electronic signatures, how do you choose the right approach? While there is no universal “best” or “most legal” type of electronic signature, there are best practices that can help you create an optimal e-sign process to ensure high adoption. This demonstration will feature two scenarios – a proposed insured who meets in-person with an agent (mediated) and an applicant who is remote (unmediated), accessing the transaction via the web. These use cases will highlight the options for authenticating signers, presenting documents, capturing signatures and distributing signed documents in a real-world scenario.
Use Case Demonstration #2
Best practices for managing e-transactions
Whether online or on paper, agents, representatives and other business users need visibility, access and control over customer transactions in order to keep processes moving forward and to gain insight into the business. This use case demonstration will show how an agent can use an e-transaction dashboard to initiate, monitor or update in-flight transactions. Equally important, compliance and legal professionals need to have access to electronic evidence after an e-signature transaction is completed. We will take a look behind the scenes at how a carrier can leverage the comprehensive evidence captured during the online signing process.
To learn more, consult the agenda and register for this free one-day summit.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events
Tags: 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance, e-signatures, e-transactions, electronic signatures, Events, in-person signing, Insurance, remote signing, use case demonstrations
How can insurers get independent agents to adopt e-signatures?
Wednesday, May 9th, 2012
Should carriers build electronic applications and signatures into agent portals? Does it make more sense to rely on industry service providers to connect carriers and agents? Or should agents be free to adopt the technology and processes of their choice, provided it meets specified standards?
At the upcoming 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance in NYC on May 31, an industry panel will have a frank discussion of the pros and cons of each of these three approaches to independent agent adoption. The panel will feature:
Steven Leigh, Principal Analyst, Insurance, Gartner
Mr. Leigh has more than 20 years of experience in the insurance industry. He started his career as an insurance broker and then spent 10 years in an insurance company home office deploying new technology, managing vendor relationships, creating data strategies and interfaces, re-engineering workflows, and fulfilling a wide range of management and leadership roles. Most recently, Mr. Leigh spent six years in selling and supporting front-office vendor solutions for life insurers. His career has been focused on the intersection between technology and business.
Roy Goodart, Senior Vice President Marketing, Aplifi
Roy Goodart has spent the last 15 years helping design systems that drive efficiencies for distributors and better selling practices for their producers. Over the years he has spent countless hours meeting with groups learning the secrets of the industry’s most successful producers. In 2003, Roy co-founded Prospect9, which put these principles into an automated CRM and ePolicy delivery platform.
Marcia Berner, Director Implementation P&C, ACORD
Marcia Berner works directly with standards implementers, to establish, enhance and improve implementations of the ACORD Standards. She works very closely with ACORD’s 2020 Committee, which focuses on implementations, metrics and identifying future standards efforts and strategic initiatives. With more than 30 years of experience in insurance automation, Marcia has an extensive background in data transformation, training, support, business analysis and project management.
To learn more, consult the agenda and register for this free one-day summit.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events
Tags: 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance, ACORD, Aplify, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Events, Gartner, Insurance
Country Financial and 21st Century Insurance: “How e-signatures changed our businesses”
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
Electronic signature technology is being used today across all insurance distribution channels for a myriad of financial products. At the upcoming 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance in NYC on May 31, you have the opportunity to benefit from the experience, strategies and lessons learned by leading carriers Country Financial and 21st Century.
These carriers found the path to sell and service customers faster and more efficiently, in ways that meet consumer expectations and provide an optimal service experience. As such, they know first hand the benefits, challenges and effort involved in automating customer transactions with e-signatures and will share their experiences during this free summit.
Mark Streitmatter, ITS Director Application Development, will explain how Country Financial, which serves more than one million households and businesses throughout the US, achieved impressive e-signature and e-app adoption rates (95%+) among its 2,200 captive agents though a comprehensive change management program.
Country Financial first began using Silanis e-signatures in 2009. Their electronic process has significantly reduced write-backs – a leading cause of delays and frustration – by ensuring that all necessary questions are answered. If one answer prompts a request for additional information, the system automatically adds a new line of questioning to the process. The company has seen 15-20 percent improvements in cycle times, and they expect those numbers to increase. Country Financial also enjoys greater control over the process, which results in higher quality applications and less risk. Further, the electronic evidence captured by Silanis e-Sign Enterprise™ during the execution of the documents has helped strengthen the company’s compliance and legal position.
Alan Ciaverelli, Vice President, Call Center, 21st Century will explain how e-signatures have helped this carrier complete new business transactions in minutes instead of weeks. 21st Century Insurance, part of the Farmers Insurance Group of Companies®, has been using Silanis electronic signatures in its call center and online operations since 2008.
To learn more, consult the agenda and register for this free one-day summit.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events
Tags: 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance, 21st Century Insurance, Country Financial, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Insurance, Silanis
Hear legal experts present on insurance and e-signatures in NYC
Monday, May 7th, 2012
The complicated calculations and formulas used by actuaries to set insurance premiums build in the cost of penalties, litigation and settlements. If you are looking to lower your risk and avoid these expensive legal fees and fines, you should attend the two following presentations at the 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance on May 31. The two legal presentations will take place in the morning:
May 31, 2012 at 10:45 a.m.
E-Signature Legislation and Case Law Review, Lorde Lock LLP
Locke Lord LLP is a leading e-commerce law firm with deep expertise in insurance. In this session, partners Pat Hatfield and Greg Casamento will conduct a review of the US electronic signature law and share lessons learned from recent case law. The presentation will also feature a six-point framework Locke Lord LLP developed to help mitigate legal risk when implementing electronic processes. Looking closely at issues of fraud, repudiation, admissibility and compliance, summit attendees will learn how a well-designed process, supported by the right technology, can actually reduce risk and increase the enforceability of e-transactions compared to paper processes.
May 31, 2012 at 11:30 a.m.
Preparing and Defending E-Signatures in Court, Shutts and Bowen LLP
Ensuring your processes and records comply with laws and regulations alone will not keep you out of court, nor guarantee a positive outcome in the event of a legal dispute. The electronic evidence must be reliable and presented in a persuasive manner. Frank Zacherl, Partner at Shutts and Bowen LLP, knows firsthand the importance of preparing in advance for a legal dispute involving electronic transactions, based on his experience representing a top online auto insurance carrier. First, he will outline how e-transaction evidence should be presented to third parties and the court during a legal dispute. Second, he will share how the electronic process has changed the way companies respond to disputes, including the pre-suit protocol that has helped avoid costly litigation.
To learn more, consult the agenda and register for this free one-day summit.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events
Tags: 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Events, Insurance, Legal Counsel, Lorde Lock LLP, Shutts and Bowen LLP, Silanis
Silanis Government Users Conference 2012
Monday, April 23rd, 2012
On March 29, representatives from government organizations gathered in Washington DC to learn about electronic signature trends, use case demonstrations, the Silanis product roadmap and more, as part of our Government Users Conference.
Silanis’ VP of strategic planning, Michael Laurie, opened the conference by speaking to attendees from the US Army, US Air Force, IRS, US Department of Energy and more, with an overview of the most significant developments in the e-signature market. His message centered on the emergence of electronic signatures as an enterprise-class software category. He explained how organizations are choosing e-signature solutions according to the software’s ability to scale and support transactions for more than just a single type of process. This is the case for federal DoD and civilian agencies all the way through to state and local governments, many of whom have been adopting e-signatures with the enterprise in mind. Laurie explained his use of the term “enterprise” as meaning implementations where e-signatures are being used to automate a core process or transaction, run on a stack of enterprise systems, and are part of a larger vision to extend to other processes and/or departments in the future.
Government agencies are moving away from selecting point solutions in favour of enterprise solutions because of:
- Paperless mandates: Unlike point solutions that simply capture a signature, enterprise e-signatures go further in that they manage the execution of an e-signature process from start to finish, so it never has to fall back to paper. This is known as “straight-through processing”.
- Security: Enterprise e-signatures interface with multiple authentication services, protocols and devices, including the Common Access Card (CAC) and other PKI services.
- Scalability: Enterprise solutions scale easily and cost effectively while supporting the unique requirements of individual departments, processes, channels and jurisdictions.
- Consistency: From a single platform, government can ensure a consistent approach to electronic transactions and records compliance, something that is especially critical to external processes involving contractors, vendors and citizens.
- Interoperability: Having an enterprise platform gives an organization the ability to tie into many different internal systems and infrastructure already in place, such as: enterprise applications (BPM, CMS, CCM, etc.), data, services (on the cloud or SaaS-based), and various devices (mobile phones, tablet PCs, etc.).
Silanis is now seeing a corresponding increase in the perceived value of e-signatures across the board, from clerical personnel to soldiers to the Joint Staff. The benefits are too visible to ignore: what used to be a two-week process on paper has become a 5-minute electronic process – more secure, efficient and significantly less costly. In one case, a government user at the Silanis conference shared how some of his agency’s processes were so critical and time-sensitive that prior to e-signatures, paperwork would be routed by helicopter to the various signing authorities. At a time when policymakers are cutting back on spending, replacing resource- and time-intensive paper processes with electronic processes is a solution that just makes sense – but that is only possible with e-signatures.
The trend toward e-signatures has accelerated over the last 18 months, with Gartner predicting the technology will become mainstream in specific industries in less than two years. Adoption is high in part because organizations typically mandate the use of e-signatures once deployed. As an example, the General Services Administration (GSA) now mandates approximately 20,000 vendors to use e-signatures – if they want to do business with the US Government using the GSA as a financing vehicle. According to Laurie, this is how most government processes will eventually be managed, because the inconvenience and cost of handling paper is simply not worth it anymore.
Categories: Customer News, In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events
Tags: Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Government, Michael Laurie, Product, Roadmap, User Conference
Why should insurers act now to deploy e-signatures?
Friday, April 20th, 2012
The insurance industry landscape is evolving, driven in large part by changing customer and agent demographics, and higher expectations for efficient and convenient service regardless of channel. Insurers are responding with increased focus on system and process modernization, to achieve a digital end-to-end process.
Policy administration, claims and new business system overhauls are common initiatives many carriers focused on last year, or are currently carrying out. 2012 is the year of investment in customer and agent websites to ensure there is a gateway to these important audiences. Electronic signature technology maximizes the value of these investments, and needs to be considered now as the trend toward mobility, e-apps and customer centricity accelerates.
Without the ability to electronically sign forms and documents, insurers, agents and consumers will always be forced back to paper. The cost of doing business on paper is too high. Not only does an increasing segment of consumers want to get off paper and transact from a connected mobile device or via an online website, the cost of error processing (i.e., write-backs) and its negative impact on agent productivity and customer experience is considerable.
In his keynote presentation at the 2012 E-Signature Summit for Insurance, Steven Leigh, Principal Analyst, Insurance, at Gartner will describe how e-signatures are essential to move forward with emerging technologies, service and sales processes while preparing for the future.
“I enjoy understanding how different carriers address their business challenges, and how the vendors participate in creating innovative solutions. Taking input from these sources and synthesizing it with other Gartner research, I seek to identify patterns, recognize trends, facilitate discussion, advise clients on the changing landscape and anticipate new challenges for the industry,” says Leigh.
To learn more, consult the agenda and register for this free one-day summit.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events
Tags: Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic banking, electronic loan processing, electronic signatures, Enterprise, Events, Gartner, Insurance, Insurance Summit, Michael Laurie, New York City, Silanis, Steven Leigh, Summit
How e-Signatures Give You The Competitive Edge (INFOGRAPHIC)
Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
Our cloud based solution, e-SignLive™, launched last week a powerful new infographic that dispels e-signature myths with compelling information and statistics compiled from our client database. They challenge and dispel the most myths about electronic signatures and also address the legality of e-signatures and present their key competitive advantages.
Brought to you by e-SignLive.com Leading provider of legal, trusted and secure online electronic signatures, when signatures matter to your business™.
You can also share this infographic by pasting the following code on your blog or website.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights
Tags: Benefits, Business, e-signatures, e-SignLive, electronic signatures, Environment, Infographic, loan, loan operations, Online, Silanis
It’s Time to Make Enterprise IT Simple
Friday, March 23rd, 2012
In today’s world, we’re able to configure networks, deploy storage, install applications and synchronize them to multiple systems either from a PC or simply with a $300 smartphone. However, an organization’s $5 million data center cannot execute similar tasks as easily. How is that possible?
Having been a part of the technology industry for more than 20 years, Silanis knows simplicity can be hard to achieve. Some of our enterprise customers are processing hundreds of millions of electronic transactions annually. This creates a lot of data that needs to be stored for extensive periods of time, in some cases up to 35 years for a life insurance policy or a mortgage. Over the lifetime of an e-transaction, there are continued interactions with this data. If we look at any company’s data center where digital documents and e-signatures are stored, we’d find amazing technology that can achieve incredible things, but it’s incredibly complex to manage. What is surprising is that organizations are still relying on manual intervention, often the company’s best IT personnel, to fix a problem within the data center.
We believe it is time the enterprise technology industry identifies each complexity and sees what can be done to make it simpler. In saying this, I am reminded of one large bank that needed to simplify back office operations. While the back office had invested heavily in both people and technology to streamline parts of their processes, they were never completely paperless because the loan documents required a signature. Facing pressure to decrease costs and inefficiencies, the back office became a driver for straight through, paperless processing. By using enterprise e-signatures to create a 100% electronic loan transaction, they were able to keep electronic forms and documents online. They could then hand-off the completed electronic documents to a downstream system for processing, without any manual intervention (sorting, scanning, archiving, etc.) from the back office. This alone cut nine steps from their workflow. Overnight, branch operations no longer needed to check loan documents for errors, put loan packages into a nightly green bag, have the bags picked up at the branch and shipped to a central location for processing. The back office operations eliminated all manual sorting, imaging and archiving of loan packages. This became a completely automated process with specific rules and workflows. And the 20+ people who were responsible for manual checking the loan documents for errors and omissions were reassigned to more valuable tasks. Not surprisingly, with this new found simplicity came massive cost savings.
With more than 70% of IT budgets being spent on trying to get technology to work the right way, it leaves many IT departments very little time, money and resources to figure out worthwhile ways to utilize their rapidly growing electronic data and the computing power of the data center.
Simply put, it’s time to pursue the Age of Simple Computing and make enterprise IT simple.
Categories: Customer News, In the News, Industry Insights
Tags: Banking, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic banking, electronic loan processing, electronic signatures, Silanis, US Bank
Silanis Attends U.S. Bank’s Consumer Lending Conference
Friday, March 16th, 2012
Every year, U.S. Bank hosts a leadership conference that brings together top performing U.S. Bank employees, the bank’s leadership team and business partners. Two weeks ago in California, Silanis was proud to take on a sponsorship role at this year’s event, recognizing this great institution as they celebrated employee performance, motivation and innovation. According to U.S. Bank’s Anthony C. McGill, EVP, Consumer Lending, “U.S. Bank is positioning itself not only to become one of the nation’s top employers, but also to become an even greater leader in the banking industry.”
As the industry evolves to more of an e-banking model, U.S. Bank continues to differentiate itself by enabling electronic signature technology in its branches. In fact, this institution made exception (error) processing nearly redundant by incorporating e-signatures into their consumer and business loan processing, which was deployed across more than 3,000 retail branches in 2011. As a result of using an e-signature enterprise solution, the bank nearly eliminated all loan exceptions; cut the majority of document handling costs; exceeded compliance requirements; redeployed bankers’ time to sell more loans; and perhaps most importantly, improved customer experience in the branch.
Investing in transformational initiatives at the branch level is a top 5 trend explored during a recent Silanis webcast entitled, “The Top 5 E-Signature Trends in Banking” that shared the latest e-signature drivers, applications and best practices within banking.
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.
While I’ve read a lot of pundits, blogs and articles that question the future of branches, it’s my opinion that they will not be taken over by mobile and the web. Banks clearly see their value as a trusted advisor when customers are trying to make important financial decisions, and they are investing in upgrading their facilities to better service customers. Banks are building “test branches” for the future, trying out new technologies that will appeal to customers, and then migrating them across enterprise.
When banks make improvements, they are noticed by customers. Signing off on a financial transaction such as a mortgage or long-term investment is already stressful enough — imagine having to return to the branch after all the paperwork has been finalized, because the bank calls you back over a missing signature. E-signatures are a means to eliminate much of the painful effort and poor customer experience involved in contract rework, that is, calling a borrower back into the branch to re-sign paperwork that was not completed correctly in the first meeting.
Banks are investing in their branches because the majority of products being purchased are still being bought in the branch or through an offline process that eventually ties into the branch. Financial products are increasingly complex and for many customers a face-to-face meeting is the preferred channel where they can ask questions throughout the process. Banks are therefore re-designing the branch for a better financial services shopping experience. As banks try to find ways to reach out and get in touch with customers, they will be applying much of what they learn in the branches to these new channel experiences in order to provide consistency throughout the buying experience.
Categories: In the News, Industry Insights, Silanis Events
Tags: Banking, Consumer Lending, Customers, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic banking, electronic loan processing, electronic signatures, Enterprise, Events, operations, Silanis, Top 5 E-Signature Trends in Banking, US Bank, Webcast
Are E-Signatures Part of Your Bank’s Customer Experience Initiative?
Friday, March 9th, 2012
Over the past 18 months, Silanis has seen a surge in electronic signature implementations, RFPs and RFIs from the banking sector. Tightening regulatory requirements, customer experience initiatives, modernization, mobility, the need to cut costs and reduce risks – all of these are driving banks to adopt e-signing. The interest among banks hasn’t been lost on analysts. Last year, the first ever e-signature market segmentation was published by Forrester Research. Banks and other financial services organizations are deploying e-signatures as part of an enterprise strategy for efficient, straight-through processing.
In a February 22, 2012 web seminar on “The Top 5 E-Signature Trends in Banking”, Silanis shared an insider’s perspective on the specifics of where, why and how e-signatures are being used in banking processes. Webcast content was framed by five trends, the first of which was customer experience. Customer experience initiatives are gaining momentum among banks, as they try to design processes that are more enjoyable and efficient.
This is particularly relevant to e-signatures since one of the most challenging aspects of dealing with the bank remains the execution of signing processes. For the consumer, signing for loans, mortgages, investments and many other transactions is associated with emotional stress related to financial security. When you compound that with how signing processes are still carried out for the most part on paper, interacting with the bank becomes irritating and ridden with inconvenience. Having to travel to the branch just to sign, putting up with long delays while paper is routed and processed, getting a call-back after everything is finalized because someone has discovered a signature is missing from the paperwork – all of this creates a more stressful experience.
For anyone who has ever thought there’s got to be a better way, there is. Banks now see customer experience as a way to differentiate themselves in a highly commoditized marketplace where all products appear the same.
With e-signatures, transactions are completed quickly. People have the convenience to interact where and when they want and get a consistent experience across all channels, whether that be online using a mobile device, through a call center, in a branch, during a home visit with a wealth advisor, etc. It is not because someone chooses to go into the branch, for example, that a process has to be carried out on paper. Keeping documents electronic by e-signing them accelerates the transaction no matter how the customer chooses to interact with the bank.
E-signatures improve customer experience beyond convenience and accelerated processing. They reduce friction points like errors and missing signatures that otherwise would lead to call-backs after the fact. They create a wow factor when people are able to use a web-enabled mobile tablet to sign off on a mortgage closing. They also help protect both the customer and the bank with electronic evidence of everything that transpires during an electronic transaction.
And finally, e-signatures provide flexibility so that if ever a consumer opts out of using the technology, they can ink sign paper documents; the bank can then upload them to the server and still continue with electronic processing.
Watch the webcast recording 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, loan, Michael Laurie, operations, Silanis
