Finovate Debuts is a blog series to introduce new Finovate alums. Today’s feature is Silanis, which demoed eSignLive Use Your Own Device at FinovateFall 2014.
eSignLive Use Your Own Device by Silanis
Silanis is one of the biggest service providers in the banking and lending e-signature market. Banks, credit providers, insurers, and government agencies use the company’s electronic signature platform to the tune of more than 600 million documents processed annually.
The latest innovation from Silanis, eSignLive Use Your Own Device, turns smartphones into signature capture devices without requiring an app download or expensive in-branch hardware. The technology “solves the final barrier” of transactions that demand a full, handwritten signature, according to Silanis, and enables financial institutions to deliver the same kind of customer experience that retailers offer.
The Stats
- Founded in March 1992
- Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- Tommy Petrogiannis is CEO and Co-Founder
- 100 employees
- Processes more than 600 million documents a year
- Customers include four of the top 10 banks in North America, eight of the top 15 insurers, and the U.S. Army
- Named Leader in Customer Satisfaction by enterprise review site, G2 Crowd in 2013 and 2014
- Won IBM Beacon Award for Best Industry Solution for Banking in 2013
- Launched eSignLive Use Your Own Device in September 2014
The Story
Silanis specializes in providing electronic signature services – and their client list is impressive. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have been using the platform since 1997. GMAC went paperless with its global operations in 2001 courtesy of the e-signature platform from Silanis. And just one of the company’s clients, a “top 5 US bank” with more than $300 billion in assets reports processing more than 35,000 e-sign transactions every day since deploying the technology at all 3,000 retail branches in 2011.
This has meant:
- An 80% reduction in document handling costs (savings in the millions of dollars)
- A 90% reduction in loan exceptions
- More than 90,000 hours of bankers’ time reallocated toward increasing loan sales
The bank also reported that the Enterprise edition of eSignLive helped them exceed compliance regulations, make back office operations manuals obsolete, and improve the overall banking experience for their customers.
Still, there has been a region of the e-signature world that has eluded Silanis up until recently. For those transactions that require a full, handwritten signature, the options for many institutions have been bleak. Typically, there is little alternative other than to require customers to go to a brick and mortar location, even though the application started online. Proprietary e-signature hardware is expensive, often prohibitively so for smaller community FIs.
The Innovation
Silanis solves both the multi-channel and cost issues by turning the customer’s own smartphone into a signature-capture solution. The e-signatures created by this “operating system agnostic” Use Your Own Device approach are legally-enforceable transactions with an audit trail and “signing ceremony” captured, as well. Authentication and delivery to the back end for processing are fully integrated. There is no need to buy expensive e-signature hardware and no apps for consumers to download.
With eSignLive, the Holy Grail of 100% remote account opening is now possible, according to Silanis. It is ironic that the most fundamental of banking services – customer onboarding – has been the most resistant to technology innovation. By focusing on the issue of the handwritten signature requirement, Silanis directly targets one of the main reasons for this particular pain point.
From the user’s perspective, opening an account with the technology is straightforward. Signees access the platform from a browser, rather than downloading an app. After completing an electronic disclosures and signatures consent document, the customer fills out the form as she would ordinarily.
The technology recognizes if the applicant is using a touchscreen device. If not, when it’s time to sign, a gold “Sign with your mobile phone” button appears below the signature capture field. Click here and an email or SMS message is sent to the applicant with instructions on how to complete the transaction. The applicant opens the email or SMS on the touchscreen device, clicks on the link provided, and then traces her signature with a finger or stylus in the signature field. Click “Continue” and the applicant’s hand-drawn signature is added virtually to the document.
Once the user confirms that everything is accurate, the document is sent to the FI’s processing. Applicants can download and print the document for their own records.
For the FI, eSignLive provides cost-savings from fewer errors and reduced document handling, costs of scanning, faxing, couriers, and postage.
Additionally, the technology also gives FIs a number of valuable customer insights, ranging from where customers complete transactions,
where they are dropping out, and how to selectively market different programs to their customer base.
eSignLive’s Use Your Own Device is available on the Integrated and Enterprise editions. Both are on-premises deployments rather than solely SaaS, and include additional features such as advanced forms, reports, and dashboards; branding customization; and, in the case of Enterprise, a completely customizable GUI, workflow and advanced authentication.
The Future
What should we look forward to when it comes to Silanis? With the launch of eSignLive in September, new deployments are at the top of the list. And 2014 already has been a good year in this regard: the company launched a new partnership with AgencyPort Software in October, teamed up with loan management software specialist Calyx Software in August, and has been providing e-Signature services for Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)
since the beginning of the year.
Even more worth watching may be the company’s theory that technologies like this will enable FIs to become truly “virtual banks”, 100% divorced from the brick-and-mortar branch. But to the extent that eSignLive Use Your Own Device, makes on boarding new customers an easy and seamless process, the technology may be just as liberating for “non-virtual” FIs as it promises to be for those banks trying to go branchless.
Silanis Technology 
