Two years ago, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp. was preparing the largest construction loan in New York City history: $1.3 billion for the redevelopment of Manhattan&singlequot;s Columbus Circle. Around the same time, president and CEO Dave Kramer declared that the company was going paperless. "Let&singlequot;s just say that as a mortgage company, we were heavily reliant on paper," says Tom Gimpel, the company&singlequot;s chief software architect.

Understatement of the year. Mortgage documents typically require 12 to 14 signatures and take weeks to complete, says Gimpel, who&singlequot;s responsible for the technology portion of Kramer&singlequot;s initiative. Now that the company has moved to electronic signatures, the work is done in a matter of hours.

So far, Kramer&singlequot;s instincts have paid off. Prior to going paperless, the company&singlequot;s portfolio of loans stood at around $75 billion. Currently, without any additional staff, its portfolio is worth upwards of $110 billion, and the costs per loan service are well below the average reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association of America (MBA). "But we knew that to gain greater efficiencies and to work smoothly with our overseas offices, we had to get paperless," he says.

Getting the e-signature project off the ground took some serious effort, especially when it came to figuring out which technologies to use. After evaluating scores of products and even briefly considering an internal PKI deployment, Gimpel and his crew decided on a three-part solution: a document management system, an automated workflow engine, and an electronic signature software package.

The first and most difficult step was setting up the document management system and populating it with more than 50 million documents. The company decided on Hyland Software&singlequot;s OnBase Document Imagining. In addition to the actual document management functions, Gimpel and his staff have written 50 automated workflow processes using the software. The workflows automate the routing of personnel, benefits, and mortgage documents to the appropriate individuals within GMAC Commercial Mortgage.

The second phase of the project—implemented over two months—deployed Silanis&singlequot;s ApproveIt, an electronic-signature software package that GMAC Commercial Mortgage needed to get signatures on its documents that were placed online. Each of the 1,800-plus employees of the company faxed his or her signature to Silanis, which then created individual signature files. Silanis then encrypted each signature and assigned a password (chosen by the individual) and security key to it. The secure electronic signatures are currently stored in the company&singlequot;s local area network on a private drive. Mobile employees keep their digital-signature files on their laptops.

GMAC Commercial Mortgage was aggressive about getting employees to use their electronic signatures: The first implementation was for employee benefits enrollment and appraisals. Not using them meant no benefits and no raises.

The response to e-signatures has been mostly positive, though Gimpel does know of a few would-be hackers on staff. "People were trying to capture other people&singlequot;s signatures and paste them into forms, basically trying to break the system," he says. "But so far we haven&singlequot;t had any security breaches."

The move to e-signatures has significantly boosted productivity, and Gimpel&singlequot;s team is now exploring how to use electronic signatures outside the company. Already, it&singlequot;s using them for invoicing and signing the time sheets of contract workers. But as Gimpel aptly notes, the more the company goes outside, the more security and authenticity become issues.

GMAC Commercial Mortgage is ironing out such wrinkles by working with the MBA and about 90 other companies to develop electronic standards for the mortgage industry. It&singlequot;s likely that more secure PKI and digital certificates will play a major role in future transactions. "When you&singlequot;re dealing with outside parties, you have to be sure individuals or companies are who they say they are," says Gimpel. "So PKI will probably be in our future, but we&singlequot;ll make that decision when the time comes."