Big Data Begins Here: PaperClip Inc, an Innovative Software Development and Services Company, Remains Focused in Providing Solutions that Solve Problems

We provide document management, document exchange, and email encryption services, all designed to be simple but effective: Mike Bridges

Technology has allowed businesses to transition from file cabinets to organizing files in digital format. Doing the manual process is time-consuming and arduous. This exposes the risk of human error which may lead to lost and damaged files. Hence, businesses automate this process using a document management system.

PaperClip Inc develops and markets products and services that enable effective communications within a company and with third parties. Through innovative solutions, PaperClip helps customers solve operational problems and reduce overhead associated with the capture, management, transmission, and storage of paper, images, faxes and reports.

PaperClip empowers companies to efficiently and securely communicate across the Internet, in a straight-through processing model, decreasing the cost and time to process documents by an order of magnitude. The company’s mission is to create electronic document solutions that enable the business document to remain in digital format for its life cycle. Thanks to its cutting-edge and patented line of products and services, today companies can go paperless in a matter of hours.

PaperClip Incorporated has a customer base that ranges from small organizations to Fortune 1,000 multinationals in a wide range of industries, with a concentration in healthcare, insurance, and financial services. Today, PaperClip is poised to become the leading supplier of electronic document management (EDM) and Internet business-to-business (B2B) document delivery solutions focused in the “straight-through processing” or supply chain market.

PaperClip was incorporated in 1991 and is headquartered in Hackensack, New Jersey.

Mike Bridges, PaperClip Inc President, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up?

We started the company when the world was DOS. The desire of companies to remove paper from their business was becoming universal; the time and money spent just dealing with paper had to end. Thus PaperClip Inc. was established and an EDM solution was released running on Novell networks supporting DOS workstations.

And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

Over the past 27 years, PaperClip built its staff and mantra with “What If” kind of people. We knew in many cases it wasn’t about technology but the ability to change from paper processes to paperless. With a diverse customer base, PaperClip focused on an industry that had a well-defined, paper dependent, supply chain of independent distribution called Life Insurance. Thiswas the perfect place for our next innovation in 1998, Internet eXpress. Internet eXpress is a hub and spoke model connecting dissimilar EDM solutions to exchange electronic documents as data system would. Later, the National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies (NAILBA) Technology Committee developed and adopted the open EDX Standard and the magic began. PaperClip then engaged a supply chain proof of concept and then never stopped.

How successful was the Internet eXpress project roll out? Share the experience.

There were several vendors that seized the opportunity to field a solution now that a valid working standard was adopted by the supply chain. The innovation here was when the vendors agreed to interconnect at the hubs and support each other’s traffic not making the supply chain choose the winner or losers. We chose to rent our EDM solution, removing the objection of upfront cost; our philosophy was to leave no one in the supply chain behind.We knew if we could get people exchanging documents in this model, the opportunity to add even more value would present itself. How successful is Internet eXpress; over 1,200 subscriber ids exchanged over 65 million documents in 2017. Some independent surveys report Internet eXpress moves 50 percent of the independent Life Insurance new business.

What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years?

With respect to how our customers see PaperClip, we have proven the ability to balance technology with the ability to change. They trust our leadership and we both enjoy our ability to improve the process for the supply chain. In 2007, our customers came to us and asked if we could solve their secure email requirements from a supply chain perspective. Insurance carriers leading the charge for email encryption regulations and laws were fielding one-to-many architectures requiring logins and passwords. This meant the supply chain had 50 separate ways to use secure email and it was imploding.

PaperClip hosted a day where all concerned came together to discuss their user requirements, compliance and cost. We started with 36 contracts before we wrote a line of code. PaperClip eM4 Compliant Email today supports over 400 companies in the B2B deployment requiring no passwords and over 330,000 users in its B2C deliver. But our customers wanted more than just encryption; they wanted more compliance, so they could use more email for transactional business and notifications. That’s why eM4 offers a disinterested third-party audit portal, Proof of Deliver, Proof of Readability and soon Proof of Agreement, our version of e-signing.

In 2016, eM4 was added to the Gartner 10 recommended email solutions market guide.

How PaperClip stands out from the competition?

Our customers rely on PaperClip to keep their EDM technology fresh and updated. Since the beginning, our customers were mainly in-house deployments, which changed in 2000 when we delivered our Web Server version as a bolt on to their in-house solution, and by 2005, we were providing SaaS hosting. Today, we have a complete ‘Cloud Born’ PaaS in Microsoft Azure. This ensures our customers have the most efficient EDM solution at the most effective price the market provides. It further plays into PaperClip’s next rollouts of Machine Learning and Analytics.

How often do you innovate?

Our track record speaks volumes – every seven years we’ve produced an innovation that has had a significant impact on our customers. Our latest, Mojo has been awarded two US Patents and several foreign Patents. We built Mojo to process Big Data into usable data via Machine Learning and Crowd Sourcing to achieve four goals; Security, Accuracy, Turnaround Time, and Economics. We accomplished all four.

“Earning trust and respect of consumers all around the world is through a consistent focus on delivering high quality in all of our actions.” How do you interpret this statement?

We live by it. PaperClip is a service provider that generates its revenue through annual subscriptions and transaction fees. This means customer retention is key; which is achieved by providing great service. We have a saying in PaperClip that everyone works for “Sales”. Our sales group talks to our customer constantly. That’s the benefit of the subscription model because salespeople don’t close and run. They work with the customers, they learn from the customers, they solve problems for the customers and their input drives the agenda of the company. The next thing you know is; your customer becomes your best sale person.

How does your company contribute to the competitive global IT platform at large?

Because our customers trust us with their customers’ classified information (NPI, PII, PHI), the growing threat of breaches is hurting us all. PaperClip is developing a new service that we use today in Mojo called Shredded Data Storage (SDS) as a separate product line. Today to secure our information, we focus on the perimeter, yet the bad guys always seem to break in and steal your data.

It’s one of the oldest jokes around, once when John Dillinger was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” he replied, “Because that’s where all the money is.” Hackers hack your data because that’s where all the money is; what if we made that data useless, by shredding it. PaperClip is innovating (Patented) a new storage model (SDS) and will be launching it (first service) in early 2019 on Microsoft Azure with on-premise solutions following shortly thereafter. We know our success will be when companies display “Data Shredded at Rest” telling the bad guys, don’t bother, no value here.

Do you have any new products ready to be launched?

We will introduce a new standard feature without a transaction fee in eM4 Email E-Signing. Our customers will be able to E-Sign any document format quickly where PaperClip remains the disinterest third-party audit.

Mojo delivers a new use case virtually every week from transcription, translation to interpretive for Big Data customers to legacy dark data processing for predictive analytics.

SDS will have a profound impact because it’s the first to achieve ‘Search Symmetrical Encryption’.

As a question on sustainability, where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

We believe PaperClip will be acquired someday because of its growth, technology and proven history of adoption to an organization that shares our vision.

PaperClip Inc Leadership: A Brief Background

Bill Weiss: Bill Weiss, co-founder, is the chief executive officer of PaperClip Inc. He also serves as a member of Board of Directors.

Michael Bridges: Michael Bridges is the President of PaperClip Inc. He also serves as a member of Board of Directors.

Michael Suleski: Michael Suleski, co-founder, is the Vice-President (Engineering) of PaperClip Inc. He also serves as a member of Board of Directors.

“We have a complete ‘Cloud Born’ PaaS in Microsoft Azure. This ensures our customers have the most efficient EDM solution at the most effective price the market provides.”