Cultivating The Future Minds Of Fintech

Originally posted in Independent Bankers Magazine 

Botdoc is the global leader in Secure Digital Transportation (SDT) Technologies. Powered by patented technologies that allow companies to employ a secure and encrypted channel with consumers to exchange documents, signatures, payments, and other capabilities without the traditional challenges of passwords, apps, logins, or plugins. Its NOW™ product is, just that, it can be used “now”. An institution of any size can be up and running in less than 15 minutes. The Botdoc API can be built into other platforms to transport documents and data in and out of that system without anyone ever having to login to the system the API is built into. Botdoc is currently built into numerous software platforms, some of which are Salesforce and Epic.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. That’s certainly true for Botdoc. In fact, at the start of this journey, we were offering a completely different product when one of our clients approached us with a challenge: How could they securely collect and send documents and personal information with their customers who are often working off public WiFi and don’t have the know-how or the inclination to protect their personal data or even remember their passwords.

Our first thought was: Well, it can’t be done. Our next thought, however, was: But, what if...

And something special was born: a way to safely, securely and simply send sensitive information with end-to-end encryption without pins, passwords, logins, accounts, apps or software to download.

IN THE BEGINNING

In the 1970s, the fax machine was commercially introduced to solve the issue of quickly delivering important, and often confidential, documents between two businesses or individuals. As technology advanced, email and file transfer or secure file transfer protocols (or FTP or SFTP) became the standard for transferring documents. As it became commonplace with consumers, so too did cyber criminals and eventually, email wasn’t “secure” anymore.

As cybercrime increased, the measures to combat it did as well. It’s now commonplace to provide consumers with their own portals, secure email or business-specific apps. But here in lies the problem: Businesses expect their consumers to easily navigate the login process and intuitively know what to do and where to go within the portal to get their work done—even if those customers are technology-challenged or grew up during an era when computers were little more than works of science fiction. Add to that the number of logins, apps and platforms that they are now being asked to navigate hourly, daily, weekly and monthly. In fact, according to NordPass, the average person has 100 logins with passwords to keep track of and navigate. And with the physical shutdown of many brick-and-mortar stores, banks and restaurants during the pandemic, that issue exacerbated.

Think about how many things you are asked to log into on a weekly basis in your personal life, or how you have felt when you were asked to create an account for one more thing that you have never used before or may never use again.

So, imagine the excitement when our financial clients learned they could securely send and receive (or even collect signatures) all in the same session. Their clients didn’t have to login, create a password, or download a plugin or app. Best of all, the process was encrypted end to end, and the information remotely transported disappeared upon delivery and was no longer accessible over the internet, creating next level security for the customer’s protection.

For the past four years, the Botdoc team has been traveling the country talking about this revolution of digital transportation without faxes, without logins and without apps. Many are calling it Secure Digital Transport—but whatever term you give it, we call it the future.

THE PROBLEM

No one will admit it, but we all know it happens: A client or customer is having challenges with or complaining about one of the industry-standard measures a business has put into place for their own protection. Perhaps the customer doesn’t have a fax or scanner readily available. Or they can’t remember a login and are frustrated with having to reset it. At the core of that business is customer service, not technical support. So, a business representative suggests a non-secure workaround to please its customer. It may be texting a photo of an ID or emailing a credit card number. Of course, some more security-minded banks will say no and ask them to come into a branch, but in today’s world, that is not always the easiest solution.

THE SOLUTION

So, imagine instead the consumer receives a text and/or email from your institution and they are able to easily send back a picture they just took of their ID. Your business receives it in the form of a PDF, and there is no trace of that image on the internet other than what you have at your bank—not on the consumer’s phone and not on residual cloud-hosting services. It’s gone. That is the experience Secure Digital Transport can provide and what Botdoc is pioneering. Just like FedEx shipping a package and delivering it—once that package is delivered and in the hands of the recipient, it is no longer anywhere else. Completed paperwork, signatures, copies of IDs—they are all delivered securely without requiring logins, passwords, fax machines or scanners. What would faster more streamlined transactions mean to your institution every month?

As we traveled the globe, talking about this new revolution, every business representative we spoke with “got it.” They understood the appeal of a platform like Botdoc. But they weren’t necessarily being pushed across the line to become a customer because change isn’t as easy or as comfortable as the status quo.

And then 2020 happened.

When the pandemic essentially shut down the world, nearly everyone began working and transacting business remotely. Many analysts feel the world’s digital priorities were expedited by at least five to 10 years. Businesses needed secure, and finally realized the need of true convenience. Our existing clients significantly expanded the use of Botdoc, and our new customer base grew exponentially.