A leading provider of digital signatures (standard electronic signatures) and information assurance solutions, ARX (Algorithmic Research), has been chosen to implement their CoSign® digital signature solution as part of a nationally mandated security procedure for the clearing process of all digital check imagery by an Israeli banking committee.

Israeli bank regulation 357, which defines a best practice for banking IT processes equivalent to the US Check 21 Act, requires financial institutions to utilize a secure channel for distribution of checks. The implementation of an industry-wide digital signature solution that ensured the integrity of the clearing process was a key component of satisfying this regulation. The decision of which digital signature solution to implement was made by a committee consisting of industry leaders including Bank Hapoalim, Citibank, and Bank Leumi.

Director of Sales-EMEA, ARX, Raanan Dahari, declared: "The Israeli banking committee's decision to utilize CoSign digital signatures to satisfy industry-wide security standards is a key example of the growing adoption of digital signatures in the marketplace."

CoSign's track record of successful deployments, its ability to integrate into an existing system using its SAPI (Signature API) tool, and its design allowing extensive future digital signature use, after extensive review of the digital signature products available, led to it being chosen as the industry-wide solution. As banks can now digitally route thousands of checks a day, utilizing a digital signature to seal deliveries, the implementation of CoSign throughout the Israeli banking industry plays an important role in expediting check-clearing processes from days to hours. In addition to expediting financial processes, CoSign has alleviated both the need to physically route processed check documentation, and the costs involved with securing the process.