Peter Wilson
Sun
It’s 11:38 p.m. You’re at home and the phone rings. That contract you’ve been working on all day is now ready for your signature.
How do you get that contract signed and get it back for a midnight deadline?
Or you work in the human resources department and you have to get everyone to sign off on a new sexual harassment policy.
But you’ve got 2,000 employees and if you send out a memo and have everybody return it you’ll need an entire new filing cabinet just to handle the paperwork, to say nothing of keeping track of it.
The answer to these dilemmas is using e-mail to either gather or apply secure electronic signatures, said Mike Gardner, CEO of Vancouver-based Recombo Inc. His company’s new Waypoint 2.0 — which integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Salesforce.com — lets companies do away with the old pen and ink method of signing documents.
Using a secure digital signature you could whip that document back before the deadline or get all those harassment memos signed and returned electronically, said Gardner.
“A secure digital signature has the full legal weight of a regular signature,” said Gardner, who added there is some confusion on the matter in Canada because what’s known as a digital signature — not the secure digital signature used by Waypoint — can only be issued by authorities listed by the Treasury Board Secretariat.
“Actually, the Treasury Board Secretariat doesn’t list anyone as certification authorities yet,” said Gardner.
But under federal PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) legislation, he said, the secure electronic signature is allowed for commercial use.
The question that is always asked by those unfamiliar with secure electronic signatures, said Gardner, is just how do you know that the person signing electronically is really who he or she purports to be.
To confirm digital identities Waypoint uses eIDverifier from Equifax Canada
If you’re a potential user, you will provide eIDverifier with personal information and will then be asked a series of questions based on private financial information stored by Equifax Canada which only you should be able to answer.
Once your identity is established you’re issued a public key (something akin to your bank card number) and you create your private key (the equivalent of the PIN for your bank card) which acts as your password.
Using that private key you can sign documents and have them accepted — depending on limitations in various jurisdictions across Canada — as legally valid.
“We’ve been focusing on the leasing market because leasing is a great area where lots of transactions are happening, particularly on commercial leases where you generally have a master lease and then you have a series of sub leases underneath the master,” said Gardner.
He said that using secure electronic signatures speeds up commerce significantly.
“These days you negotiate entire deals over e-mail. You’re back and forth with the document over e-mail and then, at the 11th hour somebody says okay now we’re complete with this agreement, could you just print it off and fax it to me.”
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
