502 Better Tomorrow Biometric Signatures

Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Welcome to Breaking Banks. Did you know we aren’t just a show, but an entire network? We’re like the HBO Max or Apple TV of financial services and fintech. This week, we’re featuring two of our other shows.

First, David Reiling of NextGenBanker interviews Sheil Manak, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures. They discuss his first foray into the fintech world with a nonprofit and why he’s dedicated his career to making the consumer experience better. Next, Dara Tarkowsky, host of Tech on Reg, chats with Matthew Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Signify about biometric signatures in the digital dotted line.

The discussion ranges from the digitization and compliance of signatures to rapidly evolving capabilities in biometrics. You can find all of our shows, including Breaking Banks, Breaking Banks Europe, Breaking Banks Asia Pacific, NextGenBanker, Tech on Reg, the Fit of Eight podcast, and a merge by the financial health network at Provoke.FM. And now to our hosts. Welcome to the NextGenBanker podcast, where we explore what’s next in banking and talk with the innovators responsible for creating positive change in the financial sector.

I’m your host, David Reiling, and have a big treat for everyone today. So we’re going to welcome Sheil Manak. Sheil, thanks for being on the NextGenBanker podcast.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. And so, Sheil, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in fintechs.

You worked as an investor in fintechs for the past eight plus years, as far as I can see. Yeah. And before that, it looked like you worked on maybe your own venture in terms of thistle in the plant based healthy food industry.

And obviously, you’re no stranger to podcasts. And I have to mention the Pitch podcast because I’m hooked. I am hooked.

I started listening to it when I found out or learned about you and the podcast, and I’m having a blast with it. So I know it’s a shameless plug, but it’s coming from an authentic place. So it’s really fun to hear.

So that’s cool. So just a little dive into your journey as to how you got to fintech. You didn’t start out, obviously, in this industry.

So what kind of drew you into this crazy world of fintech? Yeah, so I started my career in fintech actually on the nonprofit side. So back in 2006, I was a 2005, 2006, I was a management consultant and wanting to do something different. I saw this cool new idea.

For a website that let individuals in the developed world make loan to individuals in the developing world for the sake of alleviating poverty. And it was called Kiva, Kiva.org, K-I-V-A. And I thought, this is really cool.

You know, we can we can really help people. And, you know, you can do so from the comfort of your home. And it’s kind of a fun, addicting thing to to give people a small amount of money towards whatever they’re trying to do.

And you can be really catalytic to their life. So, like, you can help them buy an irrigation pump for a farmer in Uganda, you know, that kind of stuff. You know, that was I didn’t think about fintech at the time.

And actually, very few people did. The word wasn’t really right. It was a point, as you know.

But that was that was my first foray. And after doing that, I ended up back in consulting as I was a BCG serving financial institutions. So I was working with banks, insurance companies, payments companies, that sort of thing.

You know, at that point, I thought, OK, that’s when I thought, man, there’s a big opportunity here. Financial services are like 20 percent of global GDP, and it’s a inherently digital thing. It’s numbers.

And so the merger of finance and technology is sure to come, but it hasn’t yet. And there are a lot of things that we as consumers go through that feels like they could be more efficient. And I thought, let me let me dedicate my career to do this.

And I think there’s a big opportunity there. Yeah, that’s that’s fantastic. And yeah, I totally understand the the addiction and fascination with with Kiva at the time, I have to admit, I was in the same type of camp.

Oh, gosh. You know, especially in my opinion, harnessing the power of that technology to do good and letting everybody participate. I mean, you can basically democratize good and give them a platform to do it and put their money where their mouth is in such a way.

I thought it was great. I thought it was fantastic. So let me let’s take us on a little journey with your perspective.

So going back from, let’s say that the key today is forward. I’d love to get your perspective on two things. One is the journey that we’ve been on relative to fintech in particular.

Where do you think we are today from an investment perspective? Right. Love to hear that secret sauce. But you have a global mindset and I’d love to hear where you see fintech around the globe compared to the U.S., I suppose.

You know, what does Asia look like? What does Africa look like compared to the U.S.? But let’s start with this fintech, particularly on the investing side, past and present. What do we look like? Yeah, so, I mean, as as we talked about, fintech wasn’t really a thing 15 years ago. The word really started getting used about 10 years ago and really has grown significantly.

And we were on a pretty like straight line upward trajectory, I would say, from about a decade ago until. Twenty nineteen and then. In part due to covid and zero interest rate environment, we really spiked and spiked hard.

Twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty one was just wild. And, you know, every every one of our companies was raising money at some just absolutely bonkers valuation. But also they were doing well, like they were they were selling.

Many of them were selling into other fintechs who had also raised money at a crazy value. So these companies were doing just super, super well, but also, you know, had raised too much money. And in some ways it felt like when everybody becomes a fintech investor, that’s actually bad for the sector.

There’s a bit of prisoner’s dilemma where, like, you don’t want everybody to do it because it becomes a crowded trade. And in our world, a crowded trade, an example would be. I’m building a company or we invest in a company, let’s say, then sort of instantly there are like four or five other companies doing the exact same thing.

And they’re all well-funded, they’re all great entrepreneurs or good entrepreneurs, at least on paper. And what that means is it’s just harder for any one company to be successful because you’re sort of selling into the same customer set and it becomes very hard. So now, you know, we went from being the bell at the ball two years ago to falling completely out of favor.

And it happened rapidly. There was this whiplash from 2021 to 2022. And I’d say I’m still as excited as I was a few years ago.

Probably not as excited as I was in 2021. I think, you know, like like a lot of folks, I thought, OK, man, we are, you know, as an investor, we’re geniuses, we, you know, everything we invest in turns to gold. And of course, that’s not really true.

But, you know, I think the things I believed then, which were what we talked about, financial services are inherently digital. They’re still not as touched by technology. There’s still opportunities to improve.

All of that stuff remains true. And so I’m excited. And I think really the way to look at it was just we had a two year blip.

2020 and 2021 were just this crazy blip. And we’re kind of reverting to the mean, which is an upward trajectory. And, you know, I think there’s that famous chart of e-commerce growth where, you know, you’re on a line and then it’s this crazy upward slope.

And you could have invested thinking that upward slope was going to continue trending upwards. But the reality is that 2020 upward slope did not continue turning upwards. And we’re on the same upward trajectory that we were at 2018, 2019.

So, yeah, that’s that’s how I feel. Don’t you think, I mean, as maybe painful as it is to experience, but you kind of you shake out a little bit of the crazy or some of the irrational money. And now you’re you’re a little bit back on.

I would agree with you. I think there’s just enormous opportunities. And the question, obviously, which are the right ones? But it seemed to be getting a little out of hand, like anything with a business plan seemed to get funded.

So it seemed a little, I don’t know, irrational to me. But backseat driver definitely seemed irrational to me, too. And not to say that we don’t have our own irrational companies in our portfolio, we do.

But I think largely we stayed, we stayed largely the same. OK, no, that’s great. So let’s just take a lens.

Let’s zoom out a little bit from a global perspective again. You know, just from your view, how does fintech in the US in your mind compare to like Africa or to Asia? I’m just curious. I’m always curious.

It seems like they’re moving faster. And I was like, what can we do to move faster? But. Yeah, they are moving faster.

Africa and Asia are different. Let’s start let’s start with Africa. Africa, in some ways here, we’re constantly telling regulators like there’s too much regulation on what we’re doing.

It’s funny in Africa, it’s actually the opposite. There’s not enough. Yeah, right.

We need some. And so we need guidelines and you need to stop bad actors because they’re making us the good actors look bad. And if consumers can’t trust, can’t trust what’s out there, then, you know, they’re not going to believe us the same way they shouldn’t believe these other companies.

So that’s that’s happening in Africa. But there’s tremendous growth. And in both Asia and Africa, there’s just tremendous growth of middle class.

And they really are starting from a place that’s much worse than where we’re starting from. We have healthy card penetration. We have a pretty good banked population.

But if you’re starting from a unbanked population, you can grow a lot faster getting people into the formal financial system. Yeah, I would agree it working in that space of the un- and underbanked and underserved it is. But again, to your point, the trust factor, very important in terms of scaling a business in that.

So let’s move on again, an entrepreneur at heart here in the owner of the bank. So I think in terms of this mindset, so I have to go back to the pitch podcast because I do think it is a rudimentary skill for almost everyone. Now, granted, I’m an entrepreneur, so I think in those terms, but you’re listening to pitches in your background of the pitch podcast.

Are there some elements that you listen for in terms of a good pitch or the quality picture or maybe the difference between investing and not? Yeah, totally. So there are a bunch of things that you see that are just like red flags. The one that irritates me is people who just haven’t done math properly.

I’m kind of like a math nerd, so I quickly am able to do it. And if like if these folks have been thinking about it for a long time, they should have these numbers top of mind. I think other people just haven’t prepared and they don’t know their competition.

They don’t know like what we invest in or who we’ve invested in. And I think the best folks know that stuff quite well and can speak to it. And the other thing is, I think a lot of folks get stuck behind measuring things and getting excited about things that frankly do not matter.

And we. You know, we really want to think about where is the business going, what matters, like if you won some magazine award, that’s great, but like I don’t care as an investor. Like, I want to see something that’s going to drive towards becoming a big business and ultimately, you know, try to keep it down.

Right, exactly. Yeah, I know your audience for sure. I know your numbers.

Totally agree with that. And it’s so interesting to hear when you’re listening to the podcast that if you’re if you have a year for math particularly, you can you really pick it up quickly. It’s absolutely so.

All right. So I have to take a somewhat of a left turn and I’m going to start with some congratulations. I think you may know where I’m going, but I kind of can’t get through this conversation without talking about your recent wedding, which is fantastic.

And you won you and your wife won a contest to have your wedding in the Taco Bell Metaverse. Now, that’s correct. I just I need to take a breath in that and go, wow, that is fantastic.

And what is a wonderful mate? Because she obviously gets your crazy to some regard. But tell us a little bit about how does that happen and how was it? Yeah, so OK, so how it happened, it was so we got engaged last August and shortly afterwards, Taco Bell had this contest that they wanted to choose one couple to get married and talk about Metaverse. And people kept tagging me on Twitter.

Hey, you should do this. You should do this. And I thought, OK, this is interesting.

I’m a fan of Taco Bell. Don’t really care for the Metaverse that much, but I’m a fan of Taco Bell. But is my wife going to be my fiance? And so I brought it up to her.

We’re on a road trip. And she said, hey, you know what? Like, it’d be fun. You had to make a two minute video.

Be fun to just make a two minute video. We were on a seven hour drive. So we spent like 20 minutes penciling out what we what we would say on this video.

And then we stopped for maybe 10 minutes and recorded the video. And and then we didn’t think we were going to submit it. We were like, it was just kind of a fun exercise, a mental exercise.

What would you say about ourselves? And then we thought, you know what? We came back from this road trip. We thought, you know what, let’s just submit this thing. Who knows what’s going to happen? So we submit it and then Taco Bell gets in touch with us and say, hey, we want we’ve chosen you.

And we thought, OK, we don’t know if we actually want to do this. What the hell is the Taco Bell Metaverse anyway? And so they tell us, no, this is going to be your wedding in this Metaverse decentral and we’ve chosen. And, you know, it’ll be fine.

You’ll get to do whatever you want and all this stuff. And you’ll be part of the Taco Bell family. And when they said Taco Bell family, I said, I’m in.

And so, you know, over the course of the next four or five months, we plan the wedding together with many folks from Taco Bell and their and their ad agency as our wedding co-wedding planners. And we’re both Indian, myself and my wife. And so we decided to do an Indian wedding in the Taco Bell Metaverse, which sounds absolutely crazy, even even now that I’ve heard it so many times, it still sounds crazy.

And, you know, we had a bunch of Indian things we had. There’s something called a barak, which is the groom rides in and with all of his friends dancing around. And I came in on an elephant in this Metaverse.

And I have to tell you, the elephant was a big ordeal, actually. And ultimately, Taco Bell told me it cost more to build this elephant in the Metaverse than it might have been to to just get out of it. And it’s because there was no concept of writing.

They had to they did engineer the concept of writing an object. Oh, wow. And it was really fun.

The whole thing, it sounds crazy and it sounds stupid. And in many ways, it was. But we have really had a good time with it.

Our friends from all over the world were able to attend. We had a group where people were sharing stuff. And it was really fun.

We loved it. Yeah, you know, I I smile every time I think about it. And, you know, since you brought this up, the one advantage that I had did not think of is especially family members across the globe and friends across the globe can can witness it or participate in or at least engage in some way, shape or form.

So you can really open it up. But I have to I have to bring up maybe the more sensitive subject in that I have several friends of Indian descent, the their parents in India. It’s very much a family driven.

There’s there’s intensity around the marriage, in my opinion, for my. It’s like, how did you sell them on? It would be the question I have for you. Yeah.

Great question. I mean, number one thing is I’m old. So and they were just like, get this guy married.

He they’ve been they’ve been trying to get me married for 15 years plus. Yeah. So, you know, they were like, OK, he’s crazy.

We always expected something crazy from him. Let’s do it. The other thing is this was actually this is our legal wedding.

This talk about wedding was our legal wedding. But it actually was one of five that we have this year. So we started out the year in India.

It wasn’t a wedding, but it was a wedding related event where our families meet each other. A lot of my family in India can’t come to the U.S. for visa reasons and frankly couldn’t afford it. So it was an opportunity to do something for them.

Then we did this talk about Metaverse wedding two months ago and in February. And then and then in July, we have a wedding at my wife’s family’s place in Cleveland. And then we have the one that we’re most excited about in Mexico in September.

And then one where I grew up in November. So it’s really quite quite a lot of celebrations that, you know, that appeased our parents. Yeah, I get it.

OK, you’re absolutely right, though. Well, thank you for sharing that. I was I was just wondering how that would fly in my family.

And I couldn’t quite get my head around it. All right. So, Sheila, I have one final question for you.

So please indulge me in this. So with with your mindset and background, what does the next this is a hard transition. What does the next generation of banker look like in your mind? Yeah, so I really think there’s, you know, we talked about this merger of of finance and technology not yet having happened.

I believe that the next generation of banker doesn’t necessarily look like the old generation, which I think relationship banking probably is here to stay. And I think that makes sense. I think commercial banking is here to stay, but I think it maybe looks different.

And I think if we think about a small business these days, you know, they are operating in some software world where they have some system of record, some operating system for their business. If it’s a restaurant, it could be toast. If it’s a yoga studio, it could be mind, body, all these other things.

And we think that those companies are well set up to also be a portal into your banking journey. And I think. Bankers that work in an integrated fashion with that system of record will be better than those that aren’t.

And, you know, that system of record might actually have more information than you could possibly have as a bank. And I think that that’s one element of it. But I think I think in general, you know, there’s a lot more software that’s going to be used in banking.

And I think I think some of the banks are recognizing this and moving forward. And I think the big banks are building their own teams. I think the smaller banks are working more closely with with vendors.

Yeah, that’s a good assessment. But I agree with you in terms of the software and what it’s telling us and the data that comes out makes for a different banker and hopefully a better one that’s more informative and consultative and quick gifts given today’s world. So very cool.

Well, she’ll has been super fun to talk to you today. Thank you so much for your insights and sharing a bit of your personal story with us. Ben, don’t like to have you on the next gen banker podcast.

Thanks for having me. It’s really fun. Cool.

And for our audience, thanks for listening to the Next Gen Banker podcast, and we will see you soon. This show is brought to you by Alloy Labs. As much as we love talking on the show, we believe that action is more valuable than talk.

Alloy Labs is the industry leader in helping fearless bankers drive exponential growth through collaboration, exclusive partnerships and powerful network effects that give them an unfair advantage. Learn more at AlloyLabs.com. Alloy Labs, banking unbound. Hello, everyone.

Welcome to another episode of Tech on Reg, the podcast that explores all things at the intersection of law, technology and highly regulated industry. Today, we are talking about electronic signatures. I know everyone gets so excited when we talk about digital signatures and contract signing, you know, and all of the things that lawyers like me get really, really geeked out about.

But lucky for me today, I’m in very good company because we have another person who gets very geeked out about the advancements in digital electronic signatures and how to keep business running, even in the midst of all sorts of uncertainty, global pandemics and the like. Matthew Gibson is joining us today, the co-founder and CEO of Syngraphy, the compliant virtual signing platform. Welcome to the show, Matthew.

They are very pleased to be here. Awesome. So high level, Matthew.

There’s so many different directions that we could take today’s conversation. But at its core, Syngraphy is, right, a virtual signature, electronic signature platform, right? Yes, that’s correct. It’s been built a bit differently.

But yes, that’s what we are. Oh, we’re going to totally get into how how differently, you know, the products and offerings have been built. But, you know, if we take a step back and think about the concept of signing something virtually or electronically or any way other than holding a pen in your hand.

We’ve been doing that for some time, but it hasn’t really been that long, has it? You know, it’s, you know, sort of showed up on the scene probably around 2010 in a new, sort of meaningful way. And for the other lawyer nerds out there, you know, when I think about electronic signatures, you know, I think about the Electronic Signatures Act, right? The E-Sign Act that, you know, we all know, know and love. That was only passed in 2000, right? So if you really think about it, the idea that there wasn’t even any legislation about whether or not a, quote unquote, electronic signature was a valid signature until, you know, 2000.

And even since then, it’s not as though there was this widespread adoption back in 2000. So I think, Ray, as Matthew said, it’s really only become popular, popular for probably about the past 10 or so years. But then, you know, during the pandemic, when people were physically separated, I don’t know, at least from my perspective, there just seemed to be a renewed focus and emphasis on the need to be able to conduct business efficiently and compliantly at a distance.

Absolutely. There was a movement towards digital transformation that’s been sort of the holy grail description of what companies want to do across a broad range of industries. Your particular focus on highly regulated industries is a good example of how e-signature is, from our perspective, the, you know, what’s available on the market today.

That’s really different than what we do. The e-sign act actually states that a fax sent to an office is a legally binding document that can be considered the sort of equal to ink on paper. And while business may want to do that, I’m pretty sure that the compliance officer and the legal officer of that company would say there’s no way that we’re going to do business for meaningful material transactions using a fax.

So that’s fair. And that was something that, you know, I would likely advise against as well. And so when e-signatures came on the market back in, again, roughly 2010, we have to sort of transport ourselves back in time.

It’s easy for me. I’m an old older guy. And we have to remember that the iPhone was released.

The first iPhone was released in 2007. And so when you’re taking a look at the e-sign act of 2000, 2003, meaningful entry into the market of e-signature solutions in roughly 2010. Really, what was available to people when they were building the first generation of e-signatures was a keyboard.

There weren’t capacitive touchscreens. There weren’t Wacom tablets in every office. There weren’t ways in which you could actually capture something more meaningful, something more biometrically accurate, because really, it was early days and the hardware that wasn’t there to support it.

There was no unlocking your phone with Face ID. No, there wasn’t. But the digital, I mean, paper, the only thing that’s wrong with paper, realistically, from a compliance perspective, it’s probably still best practice.

So the gold standard of a transaction. What’s wrong with it is it’s incredibly cumbersome, lumbersome, costly. It delays time.

I mean, distance is an issue. So, I mean, if we could have paper that was highly efficient, easy to use, a better iteration of itself, that would be extraordinarily valuable in material transactions, highly regulated industries, consumer protection. And that’s really what we’ve built.

We weren’t constrained by the lack of hardware to build what we’ve built. So we’re, in a moment, we’re going to get into exactly what the product is, what it does, why it’s different. But I feel like in order for listeners to fully appreciate how cool what you guys are doing is, is to take a step back for a moment and think about sort of our biometrics and identity generally.

And I think that sort of feeds nicely off of what we were just talking about in terms of the evolution of mobile phones and technology and how really our lives day to day have changed thanks to our unique biometrics and what we’re able to now do safely, securely, etc. I know when I talk to people about biometrics, people get that your face is a biometric identifier. They get that your eyeball is.

They get that your fingerprint is. I think fewer people appreciate the idea that our signatures are a form of biometric identity. I mean, what’s your sense? It’s actually the most advanced, secure form of a biometric identity.

We’ve all heard the stories of their kids taking their dad’s iPhone while he’s sleeping on the couch, opening it up and buying a new car. We’ve had fingerprints being pressed into iPhones to unlock them at border patrols. All of those biometric indicators of identity that you’ve described, other than the signature, can be taken from you without your permission.

Signatures have to be given. The unique thing about a signature as a biometric, a signature is unique to you, but it’s also uniquely different to you every time you use it. No two of your signatures, even though it’s unique to you, are ever the same.

And so we, as a company, took all the best parts of ink on paper and built that into a highly secure, friendly user experience, robust, easy-to-use way of putting biometric ink into a digital document in the cloud. And you can rely on it from a biometric perspective, that the signatures in that document, we know what page it belongs on, if it’s been moved, whether or not it’s the original signature, went into the document, because we track the unique changes in your signature as you apply it to confirm your identity and your intent. Okay.

So I am desperate to know how you guys do that. So I want to hear all about the products and the offerings and why they’re different than the sort of like typical sort of click here, type in your name, click, click, click, click, that, frankly, we’ve all gotten very, very used to, right? Whether it’s DocuSign or Adobe or, you know, fill in the blank, sign.com, whatever it might be, they’re all sort of variations of one another. Why are you guys so cool? You got to tell us the secrets.

We refer to everything else in the market as a proxy signature platform. And again, that goes back to what available technology was there when they were building their platforms. And that was a keyboard.

We came into the market from a completely different industry, and that was the book publishing industry. The other co-inventor of the technology or the know-how and patents of intellectual property behind it is Margaret Atwood, who is an author. And as an author, she wanted to be able to meet and greet her readers around the globe without having to get on a plane.

But she wanted a high-touch value deliverable that could only be sort of gifted by being able to send her handwriting to a physical book somewhere else in the world. And so my first task was to build a machine that could actually do that. The closest thing we could find was sort of remote surgery, but it would have actually been easier for us to build a remote surgical technology than it was actually building what we refer to as the long pen.

And the long pen has been in production for well beyond the start of this company in 2013. And we have embedded all of that know-how. And again, we’ve been filing patents since 2004.

But we’ve embedded all that know-how of how to send biometrically accurate handwriting across the internet and outputting it as legitimate, forensically defensible handwriting. And so we were a physical hardware, physical ink on paper company for quite some time. In 2013, it occurred to the geeks in the company, hey, if we’re doing this to paper, why wouldn’t we just leave it in the cloud on a digital piece of paper, knowing that it is actually ink on paper and you could rely on it as such.

And so really what we’ve done is we’ve taken all the best parts of the security of the transaction on paper, and we’ve built that into the Inked platform, which offers a number of different ways in which you can execute documents and a number of different features that were unique to us when we initially launched. For example, the video signing room, you and I are sitting here today on a computer. And Lord knows, if we go back to the COVID-19 catalytic moment, Zoom went through the roof, Teams went through the roof.

You name all of the different businesses that were video platforms, and they became front and center. The question then was, how do you actually tie in a meeting that we’re having here today with a document that we may want to sign? So we, because we started in publishing and video and writing, filed IP for a video signing room that allows us to share a document, allows me to send you a link to your smartphone, allows us to review the document together, record the session, collect signatures, and be done. So it becomes a true virtual closing, right? Let’s pretend we’re buying a house or closing a transaction of whatever flavor.

You can actually truly do that virtually instead of sitting there and waiting for people to sort of click buttons on an amorphous platform. Yes. And the nice thing is it’s all consolidated in one unified platform, which means that everything that happens in that environment, from a metadata perspective, is captured in the background for an audit trail that is, again, we will refer to as a vested class audit trail, which will tell you how long you’ve spent on page one.

Did you read that section that you were supposed to read, or did you just zip through the document? We add geolocation, we have IP. The amount of data that we collect on a transaction is enormous. But in the video signing room, the best part of it is, is that we record you signing your biometric name, signature into your phone, which we track its location and IP address, and you sending your unique signature into the document, and that signature being applied is recorded.

And there you are saying, here I’m sending my signature. And so if a transaction ever challenged, which is usually be that’s not my signature or that’s not the document I signed, then you just play back the video. And it’s going to be enormously difficult.

It sort of improves an in-person signing by recording a session where no one can say I didn’t, or it’s not me. So this begs the question, who loves this most? Is it the lawyers? Is it the business people? I mean, there’s so many different benefits to different interest holders in the transaction. The reasons I might love it might be very different than the reasons my clients might love it.

So what’s been the response, the adoption since you guys have sort of launched this truly compliant sort of virtual electronic signature availability? It was interesting enough, all of those highly regulated industries that first found interest in it. And that we provide, as I’ve said, everything from signing physical documents through to video signing rooms, through to e-signatures. We have notarial service capabilities.

We’re now launching in Q1 a KYC IDV front end that’s fully integrated into the signing sessions. So we actually do know who people are. So who adopted it? It was a government actually that adopted it first in its physical form.

And that physical form was expanded into a couple of sort of high-profile social networks, one of the top 10 banks in the U.S., a number of banks in Canada. Where it’s really shone is, for example, in insolvency, in debt facilitation. And when you take a look at that, what you’re dealing with is a consumer protection issue for vulnerable clients.

And as a regulator, when we were talking with the regulator share in Canada, their historical way of auditing a transaction, if there was a problem perceived, was to put one of their auditors in a car to drive to the location of the insolvency office, to dig through bankers’ boxes, to try and figure out what actually happens, to interview people. And when we presented our solution to them, their immediate response was, do you mean that if we wanted to audit something, we could just be sent a link? And we could watch exactly what was said, what was promised. Did the insolvency agent operate within the regulatory expectations? And so, while we started at the high end, we also, for example, are easy and fast enough that we can handle almost any kind of level of transaction.

And we do actually offer a type to sign, but we also give our clients the ability to suppress any of those lower signing methods for highly valuable transactions. So it’s an incredibly flexible platform. It’s interesting, consumer protection and consumer financial services is an area that I spend a lot of time in, sort of personally, as a practice.

And particularly when you’re talking about debt products, particularly ones that get reported to credit reporting agencies that impact consumers’ credit scores, so on and so forth. So much of the sort of disputes and complaints that arise out of the hundreds of millions of transactions that are conducted every day are, I didn’t apply for that card, that’s not mine, all sorts of incidents of fraud, identity theft, so on and so forth. And in order to open a credit card, open a line of credit, get a mortgage, so on and so forth, you know, you have to provide all of this information.

And, you know, a lot of the times those fraud disputes are valid, and someone’s identity has been stolen, and you have a way to demonstrate, and, you know, it sounds like with your product, you really have a way to demonstrate that. And on the flip side, you also have the way to demonstrate whether or not those complaints are invalid, or perhaps, you know, there has been an allegation of fraud, but very much, in fact, there was not. And right now, as companies, I think, investigate those hundreds of thousands of disputes that come in, they don’t have that much to go on, because all they have is the sort of like static document, even if it’s a digital document, and anyone could have clicked that, anyone could have typed that, and there’s just not the data necessarily available to give a company legs to stand on or respond sort of one way or another.

Your product sounds like a very obvious solution for what is a very, very common recurrent problem that these organizations have. Well, it really does level the playing field for both sides. Yeah.

It keeps everyone… Honest? Not, yeah, not to suggest that they’re dishonest. Oh, no, no, no, you know, excuse me, you don’t have to suggest that there’s dishonesty, I can suggest that there is, in fact, dishonesty. But there’s dishonesty across the board.

We have this data, we don’t have this data, I signed it, I didn’t sign it. This is just a very, it seems, a very elegant solution to keeping everybody honest, to keeping the transactions honest, and at the end of the day, getting to the right outcomes, right? Because that’s all anyone is supposed to want to do, and certainly that’s what the regulators want, is the right and honest and accurate outcome. And that will be proved by how you can defend the transaction.

And so if you take a look at the existing e-signatures in the market, they have audit trails, as they refer to them. We have an audit trail that runs roughly six pages. It’s not just a, oh, this was the IP address, and oh, this was their email address.

We have triangulation of identity before we even bring IVC or KYC capabilities to the front end of our platform. And so as COVID hit, certainly we had a huge uptake in real estate and conveyance, sort of high-value transactions that couldn’t be accommodated other than meeting somebody in a parking lot over a card table and standing six feet apart as they watch documents being signed. So it’s funny.

I’m sitting here and I’m listening to all of these, and as I’m thinking about sort of so many of the legal and compliance challenges that so many of my clients have, it strikes me that you guys, this is like a V6.0 down the road in case you guys are looking for brilliant ideas. I have to imagine something like what you’ve built could be, it’s already got an incredible value as it is in its current form, but I think about the implications it could have for sort of point of sale signatures and all of those other moments in time where you need to prove that it was the person who made that decision or took that action or certainly would make my job a whole lot more interesting. I’d kill for the day where I get to use some Sengraphy data in a deposition during a piece of high-dollar value litigation.

We’d be happy to support you on that. I mean, it really does come, we’ve had two challenges on our transaction, and both of them stopped in their tracks when we provided our audit trail. I mean, that was really the end of it.

It proved without question… Because what can you do? Yeah. I mean, you can go through and spend a whole bunch of money and still lose. And so we have built this really from the perspective of how can you A, service your customer base with a high quality, easy to use, familiar process.

I mean, we have to remind ourselves that perhaps with the exception of some very young people who are struggling with actually signing their name in script, that your signature has been something we’ve been doing on paper for a very long time. I mean, the company named Sengraphy comes from Sengraphos, and Sengraphos goes back to the time of the pharaohs, and ink on paper has been it. And we agree, it’s incredibly cumbersome.

So we’ve just put it into a digital channel, and we are providing all of the security and more of ink on paper in a digital channel. And would you say your main differentiator between some of the other, I’ll call for lack of a better phrase, the eSign platforms that are out there now is really that trail and auditability, is the manner in which you’re capturing the data. So what is it like the one or two things that are like, no, nobody else is doing this? Well, I can tell you what we’ve invented and released, and then in its finest form of flattery has been copied, which is something we’re looking at from an intellectual property perspective.

But the video signing room that we have, which allows any number of people to gather one from their cottage, one from their car, one from their, wherever they happen to be. I mean, the concept of now driving downtown anywhere and parking your car for two hours at $30 and dragging yourself on an elevator to an office that’s airless, a lot of customers today really just don’t want to do that anymore. So the video signing room, aside from being the highest level of compliance and from our perspective, best practice in material transaction technology platforms, is what we feel companies should be using as a standard.

Because it is for those transactions, it is impossible to get out a transaction if you agree to it. And the audit trail is certainly part of that. Recording is part of that.

Your identity coming into it is part of that. There’s your talking head on the video saying, hi, I’m Matthew, and yes, I want this mortgage, and I understand that if I default, it’s going to go up by three and a half points. And you just can’t get away from that.

And it also really does reduce the likelihood of fraud because anyone who wants to come in and trying to fraud in a transaction for financial gain is not going to want to be recorded on video. Generally, the criminals don’t like that in my experience. So we’ve certainly talked about and reviewed the benefits.

Any potential pitfalls that people need to sort of be aware of when we’re talking about the digitization of these signatures and these biometrics? On our platform, not that we’ve discovered, but again, we can always be wrong. And we are constantly improving. And we value and encourage client and customer feedback that really does go into our developmental roadmaps.

And we’re known as a very responsive company that does listen to their customers. Because the real-world application and use cases are something… I’m a technologist. I’m somebody who solves problems for a living.

I’m not a compliance officer. I’m not a lawyer. We need our customers to tell us whatever they need, and we build it.

And we’ve got a very robust platform right now that has the meeting the needs and exceeding the needs of highly regulated industries, of standard transactions, of sending your kid to camp signatures for quite some time now. We’re only adding more and more features to it and making it more and more robust as time goes on. I think if you take a look at the disparate… I think you described it as the Frankenstein model where you have one video, another e-signature, something else that you want to bolt onto it to complete transactions.

A, given that there’s a technology out there that does allow best practice, if that does, you really have to ask yourself, let’s talk about e-discovery. Three years from now, when you have recorded it on one platform, have signed on another platform, have stored who knows where, how do you bring all of that back together? And so the risk to organization using the Frankenstein model, my description of a 100-mile-an-hour duct tape, is how do you actually defend what has taken place in that running and screaming in all directions COVID time? Now, everyone’s settled down a bit, and people are now meeting again, and they’re all taking a bit of a breath saying, what can we do in the event that this happens again? Well, it’s interesting because companies have and they haven’t. There are so many companies that still have gone to very much a hybrid model.

You talk about what the different needs and requirements of a post-COVID workforce look like. People got very comfortable being home, working virtually. Many companies have allowed their employees to continue doing that.

So it’s certainly better, but the dynamics of how we conduct business, I do believe is forever changed. No one’s just going to sort of forget. And I also agree that from an information governance standpoint, the Frankenstein approach probably leaves most CIOs- Losing sleep at night? I was going to say sweating through their pajamas.

But it’s true. We had previously spent so much time mapping and consolidating and putting together really good information hygiene for organizations. Then you start having to use all of these disparate platforms, and all of a sudden your map goes out the window, your data hygiene goes out the window.

All of this data is now in so many different places. Some of it we have transparency into, some of it we don’t. So as a practitioner, I really love the notion that it’s all in one place.

It’s recorded. It’s audible. Here’s the trail.

From a security and defensibility point, I think it’s, I mean, the nerd in me just think it’s great. And I’m probably happy to say that you likely have at least one new customer here. I hope you have lots more after we listen to the episode.

It is our hope, and it’s been terrific. I think that one thing we haven’t touched on, but as a lawyer, you’ll probably appreciate this, is aside from all these fantastic things I’m claiming that we can offer, and we can actually back it out, we’ve also disrupted the pricing model. That if you take a look at any of the competition out there that is working what we refer to as sort of first-generation e-signature technology, it’s all built on seed licenses.

In fact, now we know that seed licenses of X number of dollars per month per year, that organizations are going to minimize the amount of overhead carrying costs for seed licenses, so they share accounts. And so what that does is further distances identity and who actually signed what with whom. Add to that that it’s not something you can write off as a disbursement.

Now, everyone looks for ways that they can actually pass costs along. So we actually came to market with a consumption-based model of pricing. Historically, when you had a contract that you needed signed before e-signature and digital transport, you’d call a courier, or you’d slap a stamp onto it.

And so all of our entire platform is built on a pay-as-you-consume or pay-as-you-use model. And the only carrying costs you have, if you have seven lawyers in your office, it would be $3 a month just to have one administrator account. And you could light them all up, and you’d incur no cost until it’s used.

And so you can then take that as posted, you’re photocopying, and pass that along as a disbursement because it’s no longer a seed license. I like it. Very, very small business-friendly.

I mean, all business-friendly, but certainly small business-friendly because so many enterprise licenses for a lot of these other platforms, they don’t necessarily make sense or they’re cost-prohibitive. And you do always have those people who are sharing passwords when they ought not to be for reasons that they believe are justified. But it really does sound like you guys have thought about this from all the different angles and what makes the most sense and is most secure, reliable, and efficient for your customers.

I think that’s fantastic. I wish more companies did it that way. Well, thank you.

And certainly, I’d be very happy to give you a demonstration. We have demonstrations on our website weekly of how the platform differs. Anyone can attend that, and we’d be happy to sort of answer any inbounds as a result of your gracious invitation for us to show up on your show.

No, I think that would be fantastic. And we’re sort of at the end of our time. So speaking of that website and where people can go see demos, if people want to learn more about the solutions that Syngraphy is offering, Matthew, where do they go? Website’s probably step one.

And given that we picked a very awkward name to pronounce as the company as opposed to the platform and its product, Syngraphy is spelt S-Y-N-G-R-A-F-I-I dot com. Awesome. Well, if anyone is looking for more information, go visit that website.

Once the episode airs, you can find information about it on Provoke.fm, on Tech on Reg, follow us on LinkedIn. Matthew, it’s been a pleasure. It was so great to meet you.

Congratulations on your awesome products and the growth of your company. Can’t wait to see the new e-notarization platform that potentially gets launched here in the U.S. in the coming quarter. And until next time, everyone, thanks for listening to Tech on Reg.

Thanks, Sarah. It’s been fantastic. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks.

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