Adobe and Arcot Partner to SEND Secure Electronic Documents to Your Inbox
Tired of those paper bank statements, or having to log into your bank’s website to get your account information? Adobe and Arcot announced Monday the launch of a new managed service called SEND to provide the ability for organizations to literally send secure PDF files to your email inbox, without requiring you to install anything other than the latest version of Adobe Reader or Acrobat. Financial institutions, utilities, government agencies—really any organization or company that sends periodic paper documents, bills or notices—can take advantage of SEND. The organization provides SEND with the PDF files and email addresses of recipients, and SEND takes care of the rest, encrypting the documents and delivering them to recipients.
The idea of having information sent directly to you resonates strongly, even in our highly connected world, because you are empowered to manage the information and store it however you want. Many have yet to opt for online solutions for this very reason. However, paper statements are static, potentially subject to identity theft, and require action from recipients to service their accounts.
With online statements, recipients no longer ‘receive’ information. They must actively retrieve it from by logging into their institution’s website. While certainly saving money for the institution and the end customer, this ‘pull’ model breaks the mold recipients are accustomed to, and makes it more difficult for recipients to manage their own information. However, more dynamic marketing and at-your-fingertips service options are readily available at the institution’s website.
With SEND, organizations can proactively bridge the gap from a paper to an electronic delivery model.
They gain the ability to ‘push’ rich, interactive PDF documents directly to their recipients, improving marketing opportunities and the end user experience, without having to worry about the privacy concerns of sending customer personally identifiable information (PII) via email. The encrypted documents are sent as attachments to an email, accessible via any email client. A strong, yet simple-to-use, PKI-based Arcot two factor authentication system built into Reader and Acrobat manages secure access to the PDF, and once the document is open, recipients are free to save it, ready for archive and instant retrieval without requiring a login to the institution’s site. According to R. ‘Doc’ Vaidhyanathan, vice president of product management at Arcot:
Our SEND service will help institutions migrate from paper to digital delivery as it offers higher fidelity, and is easier to use and more secure than other email delivery solutions. Now, organizations can securely distribute electronic documents to customers, and customers can securely interact with the dynamic PDF document, verifying information, paying bills, and even signing contracts without ever having to log in or print.
The SEND service is available for purchase from both Arcot and Adobe, though Arcot will actually manage the service and host it at the same SAS 70 certified, PCI DSS-compliant secure data center that is now responsible for the authentication of millions of financial customers worldwide.
A datasheet on the solution is available here.
Adobe is exhibiting with Arcot April 20-24 at the RSA Conference 2009 in San Francisco, California. Visit us at booth #939 to see a demonstration of SEND in action.
Arcot is an Adobe Security Partner. To learn more about Adobe’s security partner ecosystem, visit the Adobe Security Partner Community!