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RPost |
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September 9, 2013 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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RPost Has Set the Global Standard for Email Delivery Proof, Encryption and E-Signatures with its Patented Registered Email® Technology |
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RPost has set the global
standard for email delivery proof, encryption, and e-signatures with its
patented Registered Email® technology. RPost services enable both the email
sender and recipient to track, prove, sign, encrypt, and collaborate across
desktop, mobile, and web platforms. RPost services speed contract execution,
increase data privacy and compliance, and reduce risk with court-admissible
e-delivery records. Founded in 2000, RPost operates from six global business
centers, is in use in countries throughout the world, within governments and
global F500 companies, and has been endorsed and marketed by influential bar
associations throughout the United States. Winner of the World Mail Award
for Security, RPost holds more than fifty patents worldwide.
www.rpost.com.
Zafar Khan |
Email Services Secure Email Encryption Electronic Signatures
RPost 6033 West Century Blvd., Suite 1278 Los Angeles, CA 90045
310-356-6536
RPost Print Version
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Interview conducted by: Lynn
Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – September 9, 2013 Mr. Khan: We developed a business around the notion that with your electronic correspondence there are really two categories; there is “high value” and “casual”. Our focus is in the high value messaging category. When it comes to high value correspondence, there are four things that people generally want to do to protect themselves or be more effective in that correspondence: to track, to prove, to sign or to encrypt those electronic communications. We include these four service values as part of our Registered Email service platform for high value messaging. These services are generally used by businesses and individuals to prove delivery of who said what to whom and when, to track delivery and opening; what has gone out from an email or document delivery perspective, to send documents set to be able to record the recipient’s electronic signature to achieve more efficiency, and to encrypt ones sensitive communications for personal privacy or data privacy compliance. These Registered Email® services are packaged as RMail® apps that can download into your Microsoft Outlook, added as an extension to any business messaging platform, or set for automated sending for system generated messaging.
CEOCFO: Is there much competition for specialized email services? Are there many companies addressing the problem of confirming email receipt? Mr. Khan: We are one of the pioneers in this sector. We started the business in 2000. We have fifty patents that have been granted on these core technologies. We have customers that are using these services in most countries around the world; everything from small businesses, lawyers, insurance brokers, to large multinationals. We are the only company that we are aware of that has a robust offering in each of these four categories; to track, to prove, to sign and to encrypt high value electronic messages and documents. We certainly are the only ones that bundle it all together in one product offering in the marketplace, with a market leading solution in each of those four areas. In terms of competition, with any good innovation, there are those that we have found have taken certain elements of what we do and are trying to offer these RPost patented technologies in the marketplace themselves, in standalone offerings. Our competition therefore is generally from newer companies that are attempting to provide services in one of the above messaging service categories.
CEOCFO: You can send a “read receipt request” and you can get back that someone has actually opened the email. How do you really make that meaningful with RPost? Mr. Khan: With some standard email programs, such as Microsoft Outlook for example, you can set your messaging platform to request a read receipt, but these “read receipts” only come back if the recipient also uses Microsoft Outlook and his or her Outlook’s options are set to return that information to you; and these receipts cannot prove message content or attachment content, and time stamps can be easily manipulated. In short, they do not provide a reliable, verifiable, or strong record. Sometimes you may get a read receipt, most times you would not. With RPost you get that tracking of message opening and delivery one hundred percent of the time without any requirements or actions on the recipient end. Further, RPost also proves who sent what to whom and when -- we prove the content and timestamp that was in that message sent and received, to give you a record of exactly what has transpired. Therefore, with RPost, one hundred percent of the time you get verifiable proof of delivery, content and time, packaged in a way that has a high evidential standard; in a way that can be authenticated. The RPost receipt is court admissible if needed. We call this the core of the Registered Email service, Registered Email® legal delivery proof. Additionally, RPost offers options to encrypt ones message for data privacy. We also offer options to record the recipient’s reply, or to provide a signed agreement when the recipient signs off on an attached document. RPost it is really much more than what you might find in a standard email program. RPost provides specialized email services for your high value outbound electronic correspondence.
CEOCFO: Has the validity been tested by the legal system in any the countries in which you are working? Mr. Khan: Yes. There are lawyers that have been using RPost services in some of the largest law firms in the world. They have been using the service for a number of years. There are lawyers that have posted videos on YouTube about how their use of the RPost services allowed them to prevail in court, certainly in cases where delivery was challenged or where what was in the envelope, what was in the message, the content was disputed. We also have legal opinions that we post on www.RPost.com that focus on how RPost services map to the legal standards and relevant law in the United States, Europe and other countries.
CEOCFO: Does your system work with any type of email? Mr. Khan: Importantly, the RPost service is platform agnostic. What I mean by that is that the sender can be using any email sending platform; mobile, desktop, web based and the recipient can be on any email receiving platform. We offer some apps for senders to install, and those apps make it more convenient and more elegant for the user to select certain messages to go with these features. As for the receiver, they never need anything on their end and they receive the message right in their inbox. Important in today’s world of heightened awareness of data privacy issues and exposing personal data or the potential of exposing client data, the RPost service does not store any information in the middle. RPost is not a “store and forward” service. We deliver the information direct to the recipient’s inbox and the sender has a record of such. There is no storage in the middle.
CEOCFO: What was the biggest challenge in putting the technology together? Mr. Khan: First is the concept. The problem that created the concept originated when my cofounder bought a mobile device online and then realized that there was another device that he liked better. He sent an email cancelling the order and sure enough it was shipped. Upon receipt of the wrong device, he called them up and said, “Did you not get my cancellation email?” They said “No, we did not get it.” He said, “Here it is in my sent folder.” They said, “Not everything that is in your sent folder is actually transmitted from your desktop. We did not get it.” He looked around and realized that there was really is no simple way to prove delivery of ones email, especially without requiring the recipient to acknowledge receipt. Like the traditional need to “track and trace” for mail or courier envelopes, the RPost service was developed to fulfill this need, but in an electronic form, that also overcomes the shortcomings of the paper-based methods. RPost service was developed to further prove what was in the envelope – prove the content, which is more important when dealing in electronic records that can otherwise be easily manipulated. The core problem that RPost was designed to solve was to provide legally verifiable proof for email correspondence. From there we built additional features and value. Anyone that wants to track important email may want proof, but they may also want signatures and privacy. Therefore, we built the RPost service into an all-in-one solution, for email proof, privacy, and e-signatures. A key driver in the marketplace today is a heightened enforcement of data privacy regulations, such as in health care or companies that deal with personally identifiable information that must be kept private. A key driver in the market today are the government imposed requirements to protect data privacy of your clients or customers, or for the sender to be able to prove what they have sent and that the recipient has legally received certain disclosures, notifications, invoices; whatever it may be, that has consequence if someone denies receipt or if there is a dispute about the time or content sent or received.
CEOCFO: What industries are you most focused on or are making the most use of your services? Where do you see the growth in new industries? I know you mentioned health care, but what else perhaps? Mr. Khan: For us, the insurance industry is the fastest growing and is the area where our services are the most used. All of the correspondence going from insurance broker to insurance carrier tends to be sensitive in nature; either time sensitive or data privacy sensitive. You have it on the brokers’ side and you have it on the carriers’ side; the carrier communicating with customers to settle claims, the carrier sending out waivers and riders associated with policies and trying to move to a paperless environment. What we see in industries that are regulated, there is risk or there is time sensitive or data private information being transmitted; where a courier was heavily used in the past and where standard email just is not good enough, and in many cases, there is the potential for disputes or risk of data leakage. Those are industries where our services are most heavily used. As such, we have a lot of customers in the insurance, real estate, healthcare and certain areas of financial services.
CEOCFO: How do you reach potential customers? Mr. Khan: We have a direct sales team that sells direct to our target industries. We often hear customer success stories of how RPost saved the day. We learn about those specific uses, and we then help educate the marketplace. We also partner with different law organizations or insurance organizations; for example different industry organizations or resellers, to integrate our product into their platforms or to help them education their customers and members on how these services can really do three things: save time; reduce postage, printing/paper, and administrative costs; and, most importantly, speed business, allowing deals to close faster.
CEOCFO: What are some of the other services that you offer? What are people most interested in that you are able to provide for them? Mr. Khan: Those four areas are the areas that are generally the drivers of most of the interest in our business. People are generally looking to either track and prove electronic correspondence that has consequence if there is a denial of receipt or content, to encrypt for data privacy where there is a compliance need or to close more deals faster using electronic signature. Generally, once people find that they need one of those then it is not soon after that they realize the others are also important. Then they start to explore some of the specialty services that we have, such as our LargeMail™ large file transfer service. One of the most unique services that we have is something that we call SideNote messaging. When you are sending an email, the SideNote® messaging service allows you to type a private note that is only visible to the copied or blind copied recipients. When the “to” recipients receive the email it looks normal. When the “copied” or “blind copied” recipient receives the email it looks like there is a yellow sticky note appended to the top, which is private, giving those copied recipients context as to why they received the copied email. You can see this on www.RPost.com/sidenote.
CEOCFO: What is your revenue model? Are people paying per transaction? Are they licensing software? How does it work? Mr. Khan: We generally have a model where we offer services free to users that want to use them in modest amounts. For example, all users that go to our website www.RPost.com can download RPost’s app for Microsoft Outlook or any of the other apps, or use the RPost services from a web browser interface. They can send up to ten messages per user per month, free. Then, if they want to use the services in higher volumes, they can subscribe to a “per user per month” plan. If they want to send volumes of documents or notices out of one server from one user, they subscribe to a “per message” pre-paid plan. We offer flexible prices that are based on a customer’s needs.
CEOCFO: What about individuals? Mr. Khan: Individuals can go to our website, www.RPost.com, and start using the RPost services for free in the volumes of up to ten messages per user per month. If they so choose to use them in higher volumes they can put a credit card in and just purchase a subscription plan. That comes out to be around ten to fifteen dollars per user per month, depending on the plan and the volumes.
CEOCFO: Do you envision a time when your service might be more targeted for individuals or even individual use when someone is sending something that they deem important enough to or is it just not worth your while to work with customers like that? Mr. Khan: The individual applications are essentially tied to needs every individual has at times; to send a notice to their landlord, cancel some purchase, change a travel arrangement, or dealing with child custody issues -- a big one that we hear with the recently divorced. We find that people also use RPost in scenarios where there is a transaction or a correspondence where they want that peace of mind, that an important email was delivered and secured and they have their record that is going to stand up to scrutiny. RPost empowers the sender with better information about what has transpired than the recipient has. There are certainly lots of consumer applications. We do get people posting things on YouTube and sending other comments in when we do our end user surveys. In terms of marketing it to the consumer base directly, we are not doing that through our direct sales team or direct marketing. We have to rely on PR and also integrating the RPost message into social media. Our services are available for download on mobile phones and on our website www.RPost.com. From an awareness perspective, we have not focused on the consumer market.
CEOCFO: How is business? Mr. Khan: Business is good! If you look at the trends, we started at a time when email was just becoming a consumer product. It was around the time when people were getting their first Hotmail or AOL email accounts. Therefore, we started early on, focusing on how email would be used in the higher value business situations or when standard email just was not good enough. It took some time for the marketplace to shift to electronic communication, then realize that for certain things standard email just was not good enough and then look for higher value email services or specialized email services like RPost. As such, over the years as we pioneered and developed these offerings, it took time to catch on. Today, with people more and more financially conscious about cutting costs and reducing postage, and people are more used to corresponding electronically, our business is really booming. It is booming because of the push to send high value documents electronically, the push to really take advantage of the now well-understood e-delivery and e-signature laws. It is also taking off due to the heightened sensitivity to data privacy. We are in a great sector. High-value electronic messages are sent by every business out there, large and small. For us, it is a matter of doing more marketing and continuing to get the word out.
CEOCFO: Why should investors and people in the business community pay attention to RPost?
Mr. Khan:
There are really three
main points from a business perspective. For your readership RPost offers
services that can help all of your readers to do more, better, faster and at
a lower cost. It is very simple to install our software, so it is something
that they can use immediately. The second point is that as they look at the
next generation of business messaging, fax, courier and other
last-generation mediums of communication, they see that they are becoming
slightly obsolete. They should look at modernizing a lot of their business
processes; automating more and transforming much of their traditional core
critical operations into services that can be enabled by our technology.
Think of RPost as the catalyst to move more to electronic communications or
the catalyst to bring more automation to your business operations. Finally,
with the onslaught or push towards more cloud services, if putting more
information up in the cloud, you have to realize that you have much less
control of the data that you are putting up in the cloud. You have much less
control over how that data is stored; how that data is transmitted from a
privacy perspective. Who do you call if there is a dispute if you are using
a huge messaging platform like Gmail. Who do you call if there is an issue?
If you send via RPost, you will have all relevant information about your
correspondence at your fingertips regardless of the messaging
platform that you use, and you do not have to rely on the unknown about what
is happening to your data once it leaves your computer. So, in short, RPost
can save you time and money by allowing you to send more important
information electronically and to do so with complete peace of mind due to
RPost’s added value -- email encryption, legal proof of delivery, time and
exact content, and electronic signature services. |
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“Think of RPost as the catalyst to move more to electronic communications or the catalyst to bring more automation to your business operations. With the onslaught or push towards more cloud services, if putting more information up in the cloud, you have to realize that you have much less control of the data that you are putting up in the cloud. You have much less control over how that data is stored; how that data is transmitted from a privacy perspective.”- Zafar Khan |
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