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globalCOAL® improves access to its Standard Coal Trading Agreement (SCoTA®) with eSignLive’ eSignLive

January 24, 2011
Montreal, QC, January 25, 2010 -globalCOAL, provider of the world’s leading coal trading platform, will improve access to its Standard Coal Trading Agreement (SCoTA®) by integratingSilanis’ e-signature online service, says Silanis—the electronic signature provider for 21st Century, Liberty Mutual, the US Army and many other leading financial services and government organizations.  By usinge-SignLiveTM, globalCOAL will make it faster and more secure for its customers to sign its Product Licensing Agreement, which allows customers to have access to its Standard Coal Trading Agreement— the most established sale and purchase contract in use in the coal market.“We recently embarked upon a modernization of our business processes, so we started looking at credible e-signature solutions that made it more convenient to gain access to our SCoTA.

 Silanis’ e-SignLiveTM gave us that capability and confidence,” said Eoghan Cunningham, CEO of globalCOAL. In 2010, globalCOAL brokered more than 79 million tonnes of physical coal, an increase of 38 per cent over 2009 tonnage. The company had previously employed a paper-signing process to give clients access to its Standard Coal Trading Agreement, but found that the administrative burden and time delays incurred by downloading documents, hand-signing and then posting them back was a detriment to their clients’ timely access to the standard contract —especially when dealing with international time zones and pressing business requirements.

A rapidly growing business also meant that globalCOAL was looking for more efficient management processes.

“Given our growth and the nature of our business, we wanted a robust independent e-signature solution that provided us with the ability to both audit the signing process and produce irrefutable evidence of signing intent,” said Cunningham. “In addition, Silanis’ ability to seamlessly integrate its

 e-SignLiveTM online signing solution within our own website gave us the ease-of-use and brand control we needed.” Silanis’ e-SignLiveTM records the entire web process from start to finish, including all web pages and documents that were presented to users, how long signers spent reviewing information, and all actions that were taken, creating an audit trail that provides much stronger legal evidence than is possible with traditional pen and paper processes.

Silanis’ experience deploying e-signatures in web environments and partnership with UK-based Geneva Partners also reinforced globalCOAL’s vendor selection.

About globalCOAL As well as creating the world’s leading online trading platform for seaborne thermal coal, globalCOAL has made several other important contributions to the development of the international coal market. It established a range of standardized coal quality specifications, which is embedded in its Standard Coal Trading Agreement (SCoTA®) and a robust methodology for coal price index calculation. globalCOAL is also cooperating with the leading energy exchange ICE Futures Europe to develop the coal Futures market.

About e-SignLiveTM Silanis’ e-SignLiveTM is a subscription-based cloud service, which is integrated with the IBM LotusLive platform to combine electronic signature capabilities with online collaboration and business networking. Its e-SignRoom component enables multiple documents to be reviewed and signed electronically by multiple people, while also giving business process owners real-time visibility into time-sensitive e-signing activities in order to monitor who has signed what documents and when.

About Silanis Silanis' solutions have processed hundreds of millions of e-signatures since the company was founded in 1992 (50 million in 2010 alone), making it the most widely used e-signature solution. The world’s largest insurance and financial services companies, government agencies, and service providers depend on Silanis to accelerate business transactions and reduce costs while improving compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. The company’s on-premise, cloud and SaaS e-signature solutions eliminate manual, paper-based processing to enable e-commerce and e-government transactions to be executed fully electronically from start to finish.