ePostal RPost eSignOff Service

RPost Claims to Make Digital Signatures Obsolete

RPost, the Registered Email™ house, say e-signatures are way to complicated for mass adoption so it’s upgraded its five-year old eSignOff electronic signature and contracting service so documents can be signed simply by using your mouse as though it was a pen – sort of like the way retail establishment use those horrid styluses to sign a charge.

The company reflects that it’s been nearly 10 years the federal E-Sign law went into effect in the United States and most transactions are still conducted with paper and what might as well be a quill pen signature – or perhaps at best scanned signatures – despite the tremendous cost savings and cycle time efficiencies of electronic signatures and transactions.

RPost CEO Zafar Khan, who like to think of it as “a nail in the coffin of the fax machine,” says there’s also widespread ignorance of the e-signature laws coupled with fear that a legal dispute may hang by an e-signed contract.

So RPost has made it possible for, say, handwritten signatures and initials to be embedded on documents and government forms by email to and from the contracting parties. It argues that its innovation probably shouldn’t even be considered an electronic signature, but an “electronically applied” handwritten signature, the functional and visual sign-off equivalent of a photocopied wet-ink signature on paper.

There’s nothing to setup and no education involved. The widgetry open a PDF document in a browser so it can be marked up, initialed and signed returning as a PDF. It works in Outlook, Lotus, GroupWise, SAP, Salesforce.com and garden-variety web mail like Yahoo.

And the company’s still uses cryptography and time-stamping on each page to create what are considered irrefutable and auditable proof records of both delivery and contract execution.
RPost quotes Brian Cohen, a lawyer and the former chief marketing officer of Farmers Insurance Group, as saying, “In many industries, legal departments have been trying avoid the uncertainty of electronic signatures being challenged after the fact. Finally, with RPost, there is a solution to this vexing problem. Having spent many years as a practicing lawyer and senior insurance executive, I see RPost’s eSignOff service as a true game- changer.” He recently joined RPost’s board of advisors to help with the market awareness of RPost’s eSignOff service.

Bundled with RPost’s eSignOff service is its core Registered Email™ service which provides the sender with legally valid and court-admissible evidence of email correspondence from the sender’s desktop email or directly from applications.

The complete RPost platform is offered at a flat per email price, about the cost of a postage stamp and a fraction of typical courier charges, or on monthly and annual service plans.

The Bermuda Post is RPost’s latest postal customer besides the Cayman Islands, Columbia and Iceland to offer its Registered Email™ as an official service to. It should let Bermuda Post’s business customers cut their annual communications costs.

Khan has found the post to be divided into those that are writing their own software, those that his widgetry too innovative and those that want to partner to modernize. This last category is RPost’s sweet spot.

The company’s experience so far has resulted in it developing a 10-week program consisting of a pre- launch phase, co-branding, localization, process, web presence, marketing and sales planning and isolating the internal product champion to help the posts’ launch. As a result the Cayman Island experiment will be re-launched. The widgetry is now in eight languages including French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Dutch.