05:53 PM
Sign on the Electronic Line
As part of its long-term strategy to develop a paperless operating environment to help representatives increase efficiency in their practices, National Planning Holdings ($407 million in total 2004 revenue), a Santa Monica, Calif.-based broker-dealer holding company and an affiliate of Lansing, Mich.-based Jackson National Life Insurance Co. ($61.6 billion in total assets), launched electronic signature functionality within its Web-based representative workstation system. Through an electronic signature pad located at their offices, representatives now can choose to have their clients e-sign all required account opening and trading forms instead of navigating through multiple pages of documentation.
All e-signed documents are made available, in real time, to Office of Supervisory Jurisdiction (OSJ) managers and the broker-dealer back-office through Granite, the single back-office platform for NPH's four broker-dealers - INVEST Financial Corp. (Tampa, Fla.), Investment Centers of America (Bismark, N.D.), National Planning Corp. (Santa Monica, Calif.) and SII Investments (Appleton, Wis.). Granite serves as the foundation of Electronic Order Entry (EOE), NPH's front-end transaction processing system. The eSignature technology enables digital storage of documents, electronic delivery of required regulatory documentation, electronic application review, real-time document sharing and near-real-time commission processing.