Click here for Part I & Part II

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: How has the technology changed over the years?

STEVE BISBEE: From the very beginning, at different states in the transaction, different people have different rights and privileges to act and create and manage different types of documents, which can either then be taken into the next stage, transferred to other parties, or separately managed outside of our system. That’s far beyond the ability to sign a signature between two people.

Today, DocuSign is our largest partner. They’re certainly the premier player in the world in electronic signatures. They work hard every day to keep it the best. But when they’re talking about moving with transferrable records, that’s our partnership. We have joint customers now in mortgage—we’re moving into that industry—in lease, solar, security alarm, automotive. We have 180 customers right now, jointly with DocuSign. Some, we have other partners as well in other types of technology. That’s our relationship with them. They’re able to do the contracting piece, but when you get into the negotiable instrument side of it, the transferrable records side of it— when you execute those documents to DocuSign—they automatically come into eOriginal, and after they are executed, they are managed in our system throughout their lifecycle.

Q. What are some emerging markets and technologies you’re looking into?

A. We had been monitoring marketplace lending since 2006. When we think about marketplace lending, marketplace means there’s a creation of our marketplace for those loans and it’s outside of the traditional funders. It’s outside of banks and credit unions and financial situations. The idea is that individual people or small companies can go in and actually participate. It was so small and nascent that we were monitoring it, but we didn’t see it coming to any size.

Digital lending, marketplace lending—you can’t scale that by going out to individuals. These marketplace lenders—Lending Club, Prosper, SoFi, Marlette, most of the larger ones—then began to look at “Where can I get better, more dependable capital that I can churn more quickly?” Because these are originating loans; they’re not banks. They don’t have the money themselves. They began to look at getting chunks of money from Goldman Sachs—and get $30 million from Citi or another financial institution—and they began to look at private offices, the Bessemer Trusts of the world; and they began to look at union funds, trust funds, to get larger chunks; but that still wasn’t getting the money quickly enough at the scale and the cost that they wanted to.

They needed to get out into the secondary market. They needed to get out to be able to securitize, to lower their cost of capital. It’s so dramatic, once you’re able to go out in the securitization market, you can lower your cost of capital where you can lower your cost of capital where you can go from unprofitable to profitable—if you’re in the online origination business.

Social Finance came to us, and we went to them, and our sales people began to get very familiar now with the players in marketplace lending. Two years ago, it was a very small world. In 2014, SoFi had done no securitizations. We were able to work with them and map out a process where they were able to very efficiently go through that process of being able to get their assets out in the secondary market. They did six or seven securitizations in 2015 for a little under $2 billion. That sent a signal to other players in the market that eOriginal had this capability. What we saw, as we came in to in beginning of 2016, is a much larger opportunity than eOriginal is going to be able to execute on.

We’ve been looking at this in depth since November 2014. We’re involved with tech companies that are utilizing blockchain. We see ourselves partnering with companies that have blockchain, primarily either in what we see the utilization of financial services as closest and most trusted, blockchain ecosystems within different types of financial services applications, especially in some of the back room applications. We have a customer relationship in the timeshare industry that is looking to be able to use blockchain for monitoring a lot of their financial events and their audits. They’re looking now at “How do we capture that information into the eOriginal platform?” We expect over the next year or so that we’ll have aspects of blockchain that we’ll be leveraging. It’s always true in technology: You have a broad concept that will actually have specific applications, and the specific applications are going to be able to be monetized. And that’s still to be sorted out, but we certainly intend to be part of that.

Q. Where do you see the company in five years?

A. eOriginal is a “platform.” It’s a small word but it’s very important. eOriginal has the ability to bring different people in different entities, different companies, different roles and responsibilities, over the course of a transaction. Let’s say a financial transaction. That’s applicable wherever you are in the world. Almost everywhere in the world today, there’s some form of legal authorization for electronic contracting. We see this with DocuSign now, opening six centers globally around the world. You see this now with Adobe and other players. In five years, what’s happening in digital lending here in the United States is going to be in a much more of a universal or global state. We’re looking at five years from now to be more global. That’s going to be a slow process, because what we have to achieve right now is executing the business that’s in front of us. We need to make sure that what we’re doing is scalable, from a business process perspective, technology perspective, and customer service/support. One of the things that has enabled eOriginal to be successful is that we have extremely high ratings from our customers in terms of the support we provide them. As you grow and scale, you grow by a third, you grow by half, you grow by 100%, you know, over a year or over two years, maintaining that quality of service, that quality of delivery, is something every company struggles with. So, working on that from a domestic perspective, first, is going to be our goal, but in five years we see this being a global platform for digital transaction management—what we used to call electronic transaction management.

Connect with Steve on LinkedIn

Sponsored by:

Founded in 1969, KatzAbosch is one of the largest CPA and business consulting services in the Mid-Atlantic region. Our mission is to provide the highest quality accounting, tax, financial and management consulting services to our clients. We understand the needs and challenges of our clients and we have made it our obligation to create, grow and protect asset value. The experts at KatzAbosch offer a full service solution while maintaining a tradition of ethics and incorporating the latest technology and unique business practices. Excellence in an industry often begins with how those closest to the company—its clients and employees—feel about it. For these individuals, KatzAbosch is a place where people and businesses excel and prosper. Our advisors can meet all of your service needs including; Audit & Accounting, Business Valuation & Litigation Support, Consulting, Estate Planning & Administration, Financial Institution Services, Forensic Accounting & Fraud Examinations, State and Local Tax (SALT), Taxes & Planning.

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

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

Connect on LinkedIn