Striata secure e-document delivery solution boon for financial services industry

The development of secure e-document delivery technology is reducing the vast administrative burden borne by financial services organisations in the issuing of confidential and time-sensitive documentation.

Share transaction notifications, deal confirmations, portfolio valuations, analyst reports, forex trade confirmations and a host of others can now be sent as secure electronic documents via e-mail over the public Internet.

"Huge amounts of time-critical and confidential information needs to be dispersed by the financial services industry every day," says Veronica Haupt, business development manager at Striata, the international electronic messaging specialist.

"E-mailing of such information is the obvious solution but to deliver hundreds, even thousands of a time-sensitive share analyses, forex trades or critical market research reports while maintaining confidentiality requires a highly secure, high volume technology platform, and e-mail delivery expertise if the documentation is to be delivered to the right people at the right time."

To execute secure electronic document delivery requires high levels of expertise and Internet experience to ensure the documents are delivered and not rejected by spam filters or other blocking mechanisms.

"Striata is white-listed with major ISPs like Internet Solutions, MWeb and UUNet and a further 200 major ISPs worldwide, which is critical to our capability to send high levels of e-mail quickly and securely and confirm that the e-mail has been delivered," says Haupt.

"Our servers are not black-listed and we run daily checks to maintain this status on the 300 or so blacklists operating worldwide. We have the infrastructure and policies in place to prevent black-listing, a process that rejects e-mail from potential spam servers. We also check the content of our e-mails before release to ensure there is little chance of them being blocked by spam filters."

Haupt added that in these circumstances there are compelling reasons for financial services companies to use specialist e-document delivery service providers that adopt and implement effective secure e-document delivery technology, have well-established, mature, highly functional and feature-rich technology platforms as well as detailed knowledge of the intricacies of the Internet environment.

"Effective e-document delivery solutions are based upon far more than just technology. Experience and intellectual property is also involved. For example, we have successful and proven adoption strategies that we assist our clients to employ, to increase user uptake of e-document delivery over print-and-post. We also have a deliverability commission in place, comprising a team that checks our delivery rates and statuses, and implements solutions that ensure our e-mails get through the huge variety of barriers that exist."

This is an important exercise because if a company does track the delivery rates of the bulk e-mails it sends, then it is in danger of losing customers through non-communication.

The confidentiality of information is ensured because the communication is system generated, encrypted and password-protected, if necessary. The only people who see it are the broker, analyst or financial adviser who generated and entered the information and the person who receives it. Opportunities for identity theft are virtually non-existent.

An integral part of the secure e-document delivery solution that Striata provides to the financial services industry is the monitoring and clean-up of the customer database.

"We don't have control of the customer's database content or structure at the outset," says Haupt. "However, our deliverability commission analyses the returns from every bulk e-mailing exercise and ultimately this leads to a clean, accurate database and very high confirmed delivery rates of between 99% and 100%.

"Our system is streamlined for tracking and administration. It will generate a snapshot of who received the communication, who didn't and why they didn't, with detailed reasons, such as the mailbox was full at the time or the address was incorrect."

The solutions that Striata offers embrace multiple delivery formats, using e-mail, fax and SMS, or any combination of these, to ensure the customer's time-critical communication gets to the person for whom it is intended.

"The delivery of the communication could be executed in order of customer preference for a particular medium (eg, first e-mail and then fax), or it could be driven by business rules around the data, but the overall objective is to maximise the delivery of time-critical information," Haupt adds.

The solutions are flexible and can be applied to the delivery of any documents such as trade confirmations, tax packs, investment portfolio evaluations, broker's notes and the like. Two-way communication can be initiated with built-in mouse-click options or reply SMSes to, for example, accept or reject an offer which might be any transaction from a purchase price for shares or foreign exchange. Updated client details can also be submitted from a form within a document, with the click of a button.

"An instant response facility helps to speed up processes, giving immediacy to a transaction and that is very valuable. Paper savings can be very significant, three to four times less costly than posting letters, and minimal people and resources are required. The technology provides a rich, interactive experience of the statement and other documents also allows for consolidation. Instead of doing 10 runs to the same addressee, the documentation can be consolidated and delivered in a single e-mail."