The Callon Blog

Delivering Consumer Protection - iinked™ eSignatures

This link will take you to a very good discussion (the “Callon blog”) on the consumer protection aspect of electronic or e signatures, such as our iinked™ platform here at Syngrafii.

In full disclosure, for a number of years, I was the Registrar in Bankruptcy for the Superior Court of Justice (Ontario) at Toronto and James Callon was the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, with overall responsibility for the administration of Canada’s insolvency regime.

As the Registrar of the then (and now still I believe) largest consumer insolvency Court in Canada, and the only full-time judicial officer at that time doing that work in Ontario, Jim and I often crossed paths professionally, and his representatives appeared in front of me in my Court on a regular basis.

The Callon blog raises a number of areas of potential fraud against consumers in the execution of documents by lenders, insurance representatives and financial advisers. Now, as we all know, the possibility of fraudulent execution of documents against consumers can occur in a traditional face-to-face/ink on paper execution setting, as we have been used to for years and years. However, as we move increasingly into a world of non-face-to-face meetings and remote execution of documents, collectively we need to look at best practices for the remote execution of those documents.

Here at Syngrafii, we built original one-time-use signatures and non-repudiation into our products from the ground up. While we permit click to sign and type to sign, we would caution against using those execution methods for any but the most routine and low-level documents. Users, be they businesses putting documents to consumers, or consumers themselves, should insist on the security of e signature platforms which require a true representation of an individual’s signature. Only a signature is a measurable biometric of the human purporting to execute and be bound by a document. Click and type to sign only prove that someone had access to your computer, not that that person was you. Unlike our competitors, iinked™ not only provides the ability to require an actual signature, but we do not allow signatures to be cut and pasted within a document or elsewhere. Our platform requires the humans whose intent to be bound is being evidenced to apply their unique biometric signature, in each and every place in a document – just like they would with ink and paper. Going further, and to the point of the Callon Blog, we also track and log in our MasterFile™ Audit trail, pressure, speed and other unique to the signer data contained in each and every signature. These elements constitute the unique biometric makeup of your signature and are what forensic handwriting analysts look at to opine on the authenticity of a signature and identity of the signer. These attributes become part of the permanent record of signing the document, together with the other elements that Mr. Callon lists in his call to action: metrics around creation of the document, its execution, its processing, and much much more. And all of this verifying data is available to all signatories, including the consumer, securely stored in an unalterable database in our cloud environment for later retrieval if required. This provides both a shield and a sword when it comes to non-repudiation.

The result is a transaction that provides gold standard protection to consumers and businesses that what is signed is legitimate and truly represents the intent to be bound. That is, after all, the bottom inline in proving and enforcing any contract.

For consumers, this provides protection that proves that if they did not sign the document alleged, they can rely on their copy of the MasterFile™ Audit trail of the transaction which will fully support what s/he did sign at the time, in the form of a digitally signed and encrypted original executed document to compare to what it is claimed they signed. Easy, secure, provable. Gold standard protection for consumers equals trust, reliability and profitability for businesses.

We go one more step further than our competitors with our patented Video Signing Room™ (VSR™). VSR™ enables all of the parties to a document, businesses and consumers alike, to meet in our fully integrated and entirely web-based video environment, within which all or part of the meeting can be recorded and the entirety of our iinked™ platform can be accessed. As with all of our iinked™ offerings, no special applications or plugins are required, making it the perfect environment for both ordinary consumers and users whose devices are behind corporate or governmental security and firewalls. If your device can access the internet, it can access and use or products. And, just like with iinked™ signing options, the entirety of the VSR™ experience, including any recorded portion(s) of the meeting, is securely and permanently included in the MasterFile™ Audit trail, and the recording itself is also securely stored in our cloud for later access as well as signers being provided with a secure copy for the files immediately after a session.

Again…easy, secure, provable. We think you will agree that iinked™ and VSR™ are best in class for both consumers and business protection.

Thanks, Jim, for looking at this from a different angle. We sell to businesses, but we protect consumers.

Scott W. Nettie
General Counsel
snettie@syngrafii.com