Click here for Part I & Part III

Digitally managing and securing critical documents

Steve Bisbee is president and CEO of eOriginal, as well as one of the company’s co-founders. For over 20 years, eOriginal has provided businesses with cutting edge solutions for electronic transaction management. The company’s platform allows users to quickly and securely sign, management, control, and protect critical legal documents. eOriginal also offers real-time compliance and data analytics solutions, in addition to professional training and support services. Through his capacity as a leading innovator in the electronic signature and transaction space, Steve has supported the development of US law, testified before Congress, and presented to the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. He is a founding member of Electronic Signature and Records Association (ESRA), where he currently serves as Board member and Chair of the Membership Committee.

EDWIN WARFIELD: You were telling us the story of how eOriginal got started. What happened after you assembled the founding team and vision?

STEVE BISBEE: We then had to go and raise the money to be able to start the company, to be able to build out the true requirements to this electronically, as well as to fund the business. Doug Trotter had moved to be the head of technology consulting for EDS in Dallas. I asked him to see if he would give an introduction to EDS. They were very excited about it. They had just built the loan prospector for Freddie Mac, which is an automated underwriting system, a first in the mortgage industry. They were looking to expand their business. They understood what we were attempting to do, and they were willing to come on board to help us build out the requirements, as well as to build the technology.

At that point, Doug met a fellow named Gary Wood in Dallas. Gary Wood had been in financial services for a couple of decades at that point. He owned a company called Concord Financial, which was primarily wealth management for very wealthy individuals in Texas, of which there were a significant number. He had also built a couple of companies, both in healthcare and in financial services. He sort of drank the Kool-Aid with Doug and me, and he said he wanted to participate in the initial funding round.

At that point, we raised enough money to engage with EDS, to engage with all the various players that would be required to have an ecosystem to be able to do a full electronic mortgage. That included everyone from the realtors to the land records, notarization, funders, and Fannie Mae and Freddie. We originally worked with Freddie Mac as well. We were able to execute the first fully electronic mortgage in Broward County in Florida in the year 2000.

We had an initiative for the mortgage industry. We had an initiative for the leasing industry. We had infrastructures here for this, meaning that we had a lead person running those businesses. We had people involved in marketing the technology, the business requirements, the implementation, and so forth. And then we had a third industry, which was international trade. There was a group that came to us out of Canada, from Winnipeg. They were the largest grain producers in the world. They had a problem in terms of moving grain around the world and having paper bills of lading These paper bills of lading would sort of pile up when the ship gets to the port because the grains were commodities that were traded multiple times as they were traveling around the world in these ships. It was funded originally by the Star Group out of Winnipeg and the Kwok family out of Singapore. We had some of the major freight forwarders Stolt-Nielsen and others, and brokers. I think we were the first technology to get the USDA stamp of approval for being able to do contracts electronically, and we began to build up that business as well.

At that point, everything to do with electronic commerce collapsed. There was no funding for it. Businesses were scrambling to maintain the market share that they had. Technology dollars went for maintenance of existing technology, and certainly people were not looking for new technology, especially in financial services.

At that point, because we had a very strong investor base—we had somewhere between 125-130 people, employees and consultants—and we had launched three different products in what was then called an ASP model—meaning a hosted model—a number of the banks that were working with us were concerned. Here we have a small company in Baltimore and the tech bubble just burst, and what happens if they went away? What would happen to our assets?

They loved what we did, they loved how we did it, loved the technology, but they wanted to take it and be able to run that technology themselves. We took that opportunity to build, get all the requirements. We took all the elements of our technology that we used for mortgage, and for lease, and for international trade, did a gap analysis on the requirements in the code, and then completely rebuilt it from the ground up as enterprise software, Oracle based—something that financial services would be using themselves for scale. We completed that in 2003–2004, right here in the warehouse.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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