[THE HAGUE / BOEBLINGEN] Softpro, the world's leading vendor of systems for fraud prevention solutions, capture and verification of handwritten signatures, and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI, www.forensicinstitute.nl), a departmental agency of the Dutch Ministry of Justice announce to partner in the research and development of innovative tools focusing on the science of verifying signatures.
In the future the NFI might leverage Softpro's technology to aid forensic experts in detecting forgeries more quickly and efficiently. Vice versa the NFI will share its expertise with Softpro to be reflected in upcoming releases of Softpro's fraud prevention and signature verification suite SignPlus.

Advancing Signature Verification

The organizations plan to cooperate on research projects for the advancement of signature verification. Research topics will include enhanced methods and tools for aiding forensic experts, cleaning of signatures (filter image components which do not belong to signatures), signature complexity analysis and sophisticated detection of forgeries.

Elisa van den Heuvel, forensic scientist at the NFI: "We have screened several vendors for a potential partnership. We choose Softpro to collaborate with because Softpro has gained an outstanding expertise over the course of many real world applications concerning signature verification. We share the same goal: to achieve the most accurate, empirical and deterministic verification of handwritten signatures possible. We also honor the fact that Softpro is a company with a proven record of being dedicated to research and development, being a driver of innovation for many years."

Alain Sarraf, CTO of the Softpro Group adds: "Softpro is very proud to have the opportunity to work closely with the NFI as it is an institution that not only enjoys an excellent reputation, but that is also seen as forerunner in forensic science. Together we share core values such as achieving the highest level of trustworthiness in what we are doing, and finding innovative ways to improve the verification of signatures. We strive to supply our customers with a competitive edge and believe that teaming with the NFI will provide us with valuable insight into even the most complex verification scenarios."

The Netherlands Forensic Institute uses state-of-the-art technology and science to provide high-quality forensic services on behalf of its clients. The NFI provides objective forensic information and works on the basis of specific examination assignments submitted by its clients. The NFI is independent and does not adopt any positions with regard to guilt or innocence.

Challenge Check Fraud

Unfortunatly check fraud crime is easy to commit with little downside risk to the perpetrator: Enhanced financial products, services and customer access as well as enabling technologies such as scanners, all increase the avenues of opportunity for fraud. Softpro addresses these challenges with a holistic solution called SignPlus, now successfully in production at leading financial institutions around the globe, and securing millions of transactions every day.

About SOFTPRO

The SOFTPRO Group is the worldwide leading vendor of systems for capture and verification of handwritten signatures. The company is based in Boeblingen, Germany with local subsidiaries in North America (Bear, Delaware), the United Kingdom (London), and Asia-Pacific (Singapore).

The group currently employs an international staff of over 60 people, enabling more than 200 companies worldwide to streamline their document and transaction workflows.

With its "eSign Workflow" product line, SOFTPRO provides solutions for securing the authenticity and integrity of documents within electronic processes, such as those required for legal contracts. For this purpose, a unique signature technology is used to extract and evaluate both the static and dynamic (biometric) characteristics of handwritten signatures.
SOFTPRO’s "Fraud Prevention Solutions" portfolio provides a holistic approach to detecting and preventing fraud in paper-based processes (such as payment transactions), as well as increasing operational efficiency using signature management and verification solutions.
Among SOFTPRO’s customers are American Express, Bank of America, Barclays, Chase, Citigroup, Discover Financial, Lloyds TSB, SEB, Standard Bank of South Africa, UBS and Wachovia.
Since 2002, the offer to secure electronic documents with handwritten signatures extended the customer portfolio of SOFTPRO to other industries such as banking and insurance, telecommunication, health and pharmacuticals, retail, government, automotive and logistics.

Frost & Sullivan, one of the leading growth consulting companies worldwide, presented SOFTPRO GmbH with its "Customer Service Leadership Award 2007" for having excelled in serving its customers and gaining superior customer satisfaction levels. This award recognizes the company that has gained the best insights into customer needs and product demands.

SOFTPRO's partners include: A2iA, Adobe, Betasystems, Disoft, Fujitsu Gateway, Gijima AST, Gizmotech, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motion Computing, Siemens, Toshiba, TeleCash (First Data), Unisys and Wacom.

Please contact us for additional information:

SOFTPRO GmbH
Joerg-M. Lenz
Manager PR
mailto:joerg.lenz@softpro.de

Wilhelmstrasse 34
71034 Boeblingen
Germany

Phone: +49 7031 6606 0
Fax: +49 7031 6606 66

This release was published on openPR.