We
have interviewed Carter Kirkwood, founder and CEO of Docuthentic LLC, a company
that operates VaultStreet, an online service that enables users to retrieve,
store and authenticate financial records. Mr. Kirkwood presented VaultStreet at this week's
Finovate Startup in San Francisco.
FM: How is VaultStreet more than just a
virtual filing cabinet?
Carter Kirkwood: We're different in that we are not a passive filing cabinet.
We provide automatic collection of online documents, automatic organization,
and authentication of document originality. We also make it easy to securely share
online documents with your trusted advisors - accountants, tax preparers, mortgage
bankers and so on. Users sign up for the service and give us access to their
online accounts with financial institutions. They only have to do this once. We
then automatically retrieve the users' financial records and organize them.
We then store copies of the electronic documents in a secure online repository
that's available 24/7. Documents are stored along with an electronic signature
that identifies the source of the document and confirms that the document is unaltered.
Essentially, we authenticate the documents.
FM: What is the response so far?
CK: Although we've only recently started to market the service, we are already
seeing significant interest from institutions, for which there is a huge
opportunity to use VaultStreet to reduce the cost of printing and mailing paper
statements.
Financial
professionals, such as financial planners and CPAs, are also very interested
because they see the opportunity to provide a valuable service to their
customers by making it easy to switch to online documents.
We have also seen a significant consumer interest in the service.
Consumers are embracing the convenience of being able to organize all their online
financial records in a single, secure location that also safeguards their
privacy.
FM: So how are you getting the
word out about your service?
CK: We're using many marketing channels, and also working with bloggers and
financial journalists who are interested in our story. I have become an active
blogger on our site at http://weblog.vaultstreet.com/WL/.
People we talk to immediately seize on the fact that we help to reduce the
volume of printed materials and the benefits that has for consumers and
institutions. We're also finding that consumers are especially drawn to environmentally-friendly
solutions.
FM: How about your partnerships with
financial services companies?
CK: We're talking to a number of financial services companies and financial
services providers. We find that they
are attracted to two sets of "green" initiatives, one being
environmental and the other being financial.
Businesses, banks and brokerages benefit from the cost savings that come from convincing
their customers to use a paperless solution. They no longer have to mail
the actual documents.
FM: What else is in store
for VaultStreet?
CK: We're getting plenty of feedback from our beta-testers and doing a lot of listening.
There have been great suggestions for new product features. We're already
considering ways to help consumers store personal documents, such as birth
certificates, wills and tax or travel reimbursements and receipts.
We're also developing ways to manage business operations that require the
secure handling of paperwork, such as real estate transactions and medical record-keeping.
We want to hear from our users about where VaultStreet and our wider development
company Docuthentic should go next.
