Catherine Meyn speaks enthusiastically of a day when someone will be able to apply for and receive even large loans, like a mortgage loan, without ever having to leave home.
A seller in Utah and a buyer in Hawaii — or Texas or Timbuktu — will be able to complete a land deal.
Government applications, contracts, legal documents, court filings and other types of business can all be conducted in cyberspace, the results secure, legally binding and paper free.
That day, for the most part, is now, she said.
Meyn is the vice president of development for ILumin, an Orem-based company that on Monday introduced its new patent-pending Digital Handshakes System, now in pilot production and slated for full system availability by September.
The announcement came as the company closed its third round of funding in the amount of $20 million, lead by Deutsche Bank, Alex Brown and Rock Creek Ventures, and within days of Congressional passage of a national digital signature law, which is a slightly milder version of a law Utah had already passed.
Digital Handshakes takes the digital signature "a large step forward," she said. The "handshake" is the whole business process, so in the future people will be able not only to fill out and sign an application online, but can automatically go and get the credit report, which will be attached to the document with an electronic signature to go to the loan officer, who can approve it. The officer can then wire money into the proper bank account and arrange for automatic deductions to be taken electronically from the checking account. Then the loan applicant could get an e-mail that said something like, "Enjoy your boat," she said.
ILumin has partnerships with digital certificate authorities and specializes in providing "a safe place for people to work, auditing capability so the (agreement) is enforceable in a court of law, and we insure it's tamper proof. We will also in the long run provide a community where you can go online, work out documents, have chats, even bring in a real estate agent or appraiser. It goes well beyond a digital certificate."
Besides convenience, Meyn maintains that reducing transaction costs will be a real benefit of paperless transactions, she said. In many cases, any cost associated with the technology, for the consumer, would be "minor and much less than you have now. On paper, you may pay $300 for a loan origination fee. Online, that fee will about disappear.
"This will speed up and give more businesses access to more electronic processes than before and that will save a lot of money."
She cited an unnamed company taking part in the pilot program that said it spends $75,000 a year on Federal Express, most of it for signatures. The U.S. government is planning to eliminate paper transactions by 2003 and expects to save billions of dollars. According to Dataquest, the government conducts more than $600 billion in transactions, excluding taxes. But fewer than 1 percent of those transactions occur online.
"We have the technology right now. They are using it in the Utah courts now. They've been using an older version of the product for about 16 months now for electronic filing" of court documents, Meyn said.
ILumin system includes an e-Cabinet, where documents can be scanned in and stored, a Digital Clerk that acts as a gatekeeper and provides an audit trail to see that a document is guarded, and an online Digital Signing Room that includes conference capability.
Security occurs at several levels. Besides a digital certificate, it includes a password. Secure information isn't sent over the Internet unless its encrypted and the server has two firewalls.
ILumin, which started life as Intelliquest, has 30 employees.
E-mail: lois@desnews.com