E-Signature Pioneer eSignLive Celebrates 20th Anniversary

Montreal, QC, April 4, 2012 - Silanis, the leader in enterprise electronic signature solutions with the largest e-signature deployments, announces the company’s 20-year anniversary as the pioneer of the industry.

Incorporated in 1992 before any e-signature software was commercially available, entrepreneurs Tommy Petrogiannis, Michael Laurie and Joseph Silvester launched their company with a focus on the pen-based computing trend of the late 80’s and early 90’s, the precursor to today’s web tablets. While working with their first customer Ontario Hydro, the trio stumbled across a business problem that would change their direction and launch a new market segment - e-signatures. The public utility company needed to find an alternative to routing regulated engineering drawings across the country by courier for approvals, since this was a time-consuming and costly process that would take up to three months for even a minor change.

“What started out as an idea from a customer developed into a company dedicated to helping organizations move off paper, and in turn launched a whole new industry,” said Tommy Petrogiannis, Silanis CEO and co-founder. “Today our e-sign solutions have become the enterprise standard for insurance, financial services and government organizations wanting to transform their customer- and citizen-facing transactions to 100% electronic, straight-through processes.”

Since then, the company has continued to lead and shape the market with continuous product innovation, education and thought-leadership. As a result, Silanis has been consulted by analysts, industry associations and steering committees for the development of legal, regulatory, process and technology standards involving e-signatures, e-delivery and e-vaulting. A founding member of the Electronic Signature and Records Association (ESRA), Silanis has also been a contributor to many industry standards including the Standards and Procedures for Electronic Records and Signatures (SPeRS), the Insured Retirement Institute and the Mortgage Industry Standard Maintenance Organization (MISMO).

Silanis counts numerous industry firsts, including:

• Embedding electronic signatures within signed documents to ensure security and compatibility, including the first e-signature plug-ins for Adobe® PDF®, Microsoft® Word™ and Microsoft® Excel™;
• Support for multiple signers, as well as dynamic data placement as part of the approval process, reflecting the company’s design philosophy to build solutions that support the way people work;
• In 2000, developing a true zero-client, web-based, click-to-sign e-signature that revolutionized the industry and resulted in the highest e-signature adoption rates for high-volume, customer-facing transactions;
• The introduction of transaction management, spearheading a new category of electronic signature solutions that manage the entire e-sign process from end-to-end, making it easier for organizations to implement, deploy and manage e-signatures as a shared service;
• Invention of the Process Signature™, which gathers detailed electronic evidence of the entire customer interaction and provides organizations with the strongest legal and compliance position in the industry today.

The rich functionality of the product suite is the reason that Silanis is the most widely used e-signature technology in the world. Today no other e-signature vendor offers as much flexibility or as comprehensive a platform including on-premises, private cloud, SaaS and e-vault options.

“Looking back over the past two formative decades, at least half of all new product innovation and functionality has been customer-driven, which really speaks to our core values. Listening to our customers, as well as the emphasis we place on product quality and our responsibility to the market as a whole, have set Silanis apart and remain foundational pillars for our success,” says Petrogiannis.

Together with our trailblazing customers, Silanis has achieved impressive adoption milestones such as:

• In July 1997, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, arguably one of the most security conscious organizations in North America, deployed e-signatures to the entire Joint Staff. Fifteen years later, JCS documents are still e-signed using Silanis’ solutions, making the company part of the longest running implementation of e-signatures within any US government organization.
• GMAC Commercial Mortgage became a truly paperless office when it enabled its global operations with e-signatures in 2001.
• Silanis was awarded the US Army enterprise e-signature contract in 2004 and now supports over 1.6 million personnel, making this the single largest deployment of e-signatures on the planet.
• In 2004, Stewart Title launched SureClose and made the convenience and efficiency of eMortgages a reality for homebuyers, sellers and lenders.
• In 2010, Country Financial equipped both their customers and their 2,200 sales agents to e-sign term, universal and whole life insurance applications, more than 80% of which are now completed electronically.
• The 2011 rollout of Silanis e-signatures by a top 10 US bank to its thousands of retail branches represents the largest deployment of e-signatures for consumer & small business lending.

As Silanis looks to the future, there are many exciting opportunities for continued innovation. For example, analysts anticipate that by 2020 the majority of e-signature transactions will be launched from mobile devices – a trend that the company is already seeing and supporting among its progressive customers.

“We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of this market. In fact, it won’t be long before e-signatures are seen as a means to give organizations visibility throughout the entire enterprise – from internal processes all the way out to field operations, providing insights into improving the overall customer experience that to date have eluded head offices,” says Petrogiannis. “At Silanis, we are excited about the future and look forward to the next 20 years.”

About Silanis
Silanis is the most widely used e-signature solution in the world, responsible for processing over 600 million documents annually. Since the company was founded in 1992, our solutions have strengthened the business processes of thousands of organizations, including four of the top North American banks, eight of the top 15 insurance companies and the entire US Army, among others. Companies and government organizations around the globe depend on Silanis to accelerate business transactions, improve customer experience and reduce costs while improving compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Silanis’ on-premise, cloud and SaaS e-signature solutions eliminate manual, paper-based processing and enable e-commerce and e-government transactions to be electronically executed from start to finish.