Archive for the ‘Product News’ Category
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
Monday, January 30th, 2012
Part One: An interview with a 20-year veteran of e-signatures on how Silanis meets these criteria
While many electronic signature products claim enterprise status, there aren’t many solutions in the market that address true enterprise requirements. No matter what your organization’s size, if you are looking for an e-signature platform that will allow you to fully automate both internal and external core business processes – transactions where your revenue is at stake – we invite you to read this 8-part interview with Michael Laurie over the next week. Michael is a 20-year veteran of e-signatures and co-founder of Silanis Technology. In this blog he speaks candidly about the evaluation criteria for enterprise e-signatures.
#1: Customizability
Q: A one-size-fits-all electronic signature solution cannot support the diverse requirements of today’s multi-channel transactional processes. Why is customizability so important to enterprise e-signatures? To what extent can the Silanis solution be customized to meet specific requirements?
A: One of the primary reasons why businesses implement e-signatures is to transform customer experience. The main purpose for multiple trips to a branch (or for return visits to clients by a mobile sales force) is missing signatures and/or data on documents. Once the documents are completed correctly, you still have to get the signature again. A completely electronic, e-signature-enabled process alleviates the frustration, errors and delays inherent to paper.
The real advantage of an enterprise platform is it can scale throughout the organization and extend these types of benefits to any process and channel. However, to be able to meet the very diverse needs of each signing process in each channel of each line of business, your enterprise e-signature solution has to provide the ability to customize. As a single platform, Silanis e-Sign Enterprise can integrate with existing processes, workflow, core systems, user interfaces, mobile devices, signing methods, authentication techniques and much more. Here are a few examples of why that is important.
- Signing methods: There are numerous ways to capture electronic consent. These include signature capture pads, the click-to-sign process, voice signature and more. In your retail channel, you may need to have consumers visit a branch to sign on a signature capture pad, while through your call center and/or web channel you would likely require a solution that works in a browser with a click-to-sign process.
- User interface (UI): When the signer comes to the online signing ceremony, will that interface be branded or not? In our experience, branding is critical for building trust in the online signing process – but not all e-signature vendors enable an organization to leverage their brand fully and build in an intuitive signing process. Our customers want to leverage their trusted brand as they move their processes online. We get that.
- Systems: More and more customers are coming to us with IT-driven enterprise service requirements, asking, “How do I go from what I have today, to an enterprise solution that will address all my future needs and still integrate with existing systems?” Silanis integrates with content management and document generation systems, BPM, external third-party authentication systems and services such as offered by Equifax, etc. This allows organizations to leverage the investment they’ve made in existing infrastructure and to hook into external systems or services where needed.
- Workflow: So many transactions today involve more than one signer. Customers routinely ask how the Silanis platform handles multiple signers in loan applications, insurance transactions and the like. An enterprise solution should allow for customizing role-specific logic, rules and access rights. Consider a multi-signer scenario where the first signer has to sign documents 1 and 2, but the second signer is only required to sign document 1 and is not allowed to view document 2. With this granularity in defining workflow rules and logic, Silanis customers can design intricate e-signature process workflows to meet their specific business and legal requirements.
PART 2: To be posted tomorrow
Q: Among enterprise e-signature vendors, there can be quite a gap in terms of session management capability. Some offer advanced workflow features, while others take more of a fixed process approach where processes are driven by another system such as a BPM solution. How does Silanis manage the signing session?
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: Customers, Customizability, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Enterprise Platform, Michael Laurie, online signing ceremony, Scale, Silanis, Straight-through Processing
US Army achieving its vision with paperless e-signature processing
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
It’s always exciting to be part of a visionary undertaking—especially one that is succeeding so well, and on such a large scale.
A full seven years after commencing the largest e-signature initiative ever undertaken in government, the US Army continued its commitment to paperless processing by renewing its annual electronic signature enterprise license with Silanis.
The original enterprise license was awarded as part of the Forms Content Management Program (FCMP)
Not only will the Silanis e-signature enterprise platform help save the US Army approximately $1.3 billion every year, but our solution’s recently added native e-signatures integration to the IBM Forms server moves the Army even closer to its paperless goal.
With the Army’s direction towards fully web based, zero client e-forms solutions, Silanis added native e-signature integration to the IBM Forms server allowing Army users to sign an e-form in a browser-only environment. In addition, this new functionality includes interoperability between client based and zero client based solutions. Army personnel can start the signing process with the e-signature/e-forms solution in a zero client, web browser-only mode while maintaining the option to complete the process offline at a later date.
In the paper-signing days, getting a signature from a superior officer sometimes meant sending convoys into hostile territories. Now, Army personnel can safely and securely sign online from anywhere in the world, using just a browser and without having to download files.
In addition, the fact that our software transitions seamlessly between client based (desktop) and zero-client based (web) solutions, Army personnel can start the signing process online without giving up the ability to complete it offline at their convenience. In this way, our solution is web-enabled, but not web-dependent.
This kind of flawless interoperability was one of the driving factors behind this project’s success, according to a 2008 Gartner case study that also highlighted the implementation’s emphasis on simplicity, efficiency and high end user satisfaction.
To date, under the FCMP, 2,500 of the most critical Department of Army forms have been digitized and made available to more than 1.6 million users.
It’s a remarkable achievement considering that the US Army was the first government department to spearhead automation and that once completed, the project will hold the title as the largest e-signature and e-forms deployment in the world.
Categories: Customer News, Product News
Tags: Army, e-Sign Enterprise, e-signatures, electronic signatures, Forms Content Management Program (FCMP), IBM, Silanis, United States
