From November 3 to 5, Pem Guerry, our executive vice president, attended the T3 Enterprise Conference in Rosemont, Illinois. While he was there, InvestmentNews caught up with him to get his thoughts about why digital signature adoption is taking off in the financial services industry.
E-signature helps simplify [financial advisors' lives] in a number of different ways. First, it enables a document to be immediately executed from anywhere as soon as the time is available. So you have reduced the delays, you've reduced the cost of the paperwork. It's a much more convenient process for the client so they can immediately execute the documents as soon as they are ready.
All of the major clearing firms and custodians are now accepting [digital signatures] in some fashion. They're writing standards or they're choosing one of the leading vendors or two of the leading vendors and saying "We trust these e-signatures, and therefore we will accept them."
A "digital signature" is a specific subset of the technology that enables those documents to stand on their own. You don't have to rely on anyone else to store them. We think that's especially important in this industry when you're dealing with such private information. There has been an evolution or a movement toward those secure and trusted digital signatures.
One other critical innovation, I believe, is that there's such a move toward mobility. And iPads and other tablets don't really represent a challenge. They're similar to a PC, you can read the documents. It doesn't represent the same challenges as the very small real estate of a smartphone. And so one of the areas that we're focusing on a lot is making that a very simple experience that still stands up to all of the legal scrutiny on a smartphone.