Co-founder and CEO says offerings sell regardless of economy
RPost is one of those companies whose technology is useful for multiple industries. Mortgage and insurance are particular beneficiaries.
The company’s core tech helps keep email secure as well as manage digital transactions and e-signatures. It has nurtured a wide customer base in areas including title insurance, escrow, mortgage, P/C insurance, government entities and healthcare.
Mortgage represents a small but important part of the total, CEO and co-founder Zafar Khan (pictured) said during the Applied Net 2022 conference in Nashville on October 3. He noted that RPost’s offerings include registered email, email encryption for privacy and e-signature technology are key to keep mortgage processes functioning.
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“These three components … are all important in different parts of the transaction,” Kahn said.
New products on the horizon
The company’s PRE-Crime suite is also key for mortgage, Kahn noted, meant to counter business email compromise – where cybercriminals find a way to trick people into paying money associated with a house down payment to the wrong party.
“It’s probably one of the most successful cybercrimes in recent history in terms of numbers of dollars that have been mis-wired in the billions [of dollars] last year alone, and the number of affected consumers or escrow or mortgage companies,” Kahn explained.
The company announced its PRE-Crime suite in August, which features two important newer technologies. Its eavesdropping alert is what Kahn bills as a “first-of-its-kind” technology designed to help senders see whether or not one of their recipients, as part of a transaction, is having their email account eavesdropped on by cybercriminals. The second technology gives users an alert if one of the emails coming to them is coming from a lookalike domain likely used by a cybercriminal.
“One of the most successful things cybercriminals are doing is they’re going out there and buying a domain that looks almost like the domain of the client or someone they’re familiar with,” Kahn said.
The product also detects and then gives alerts if staff members are about to reply to a lookalike domain and engage with a cybercriminal unknowingly.
In November, the company plans to formally release its RDocs platform for document security, which will complement its RMail for email security and RSign for electronic signatures. The new platform is particularly important for mortgage, he said.
“Mortgage would be a very important category because you’re passing back and forth sensitive documentation and what RDocs does is it builds the security into the document itself, so that the owner of the document can control who has access, where and how long it is accessed and have visibility as to who is accessing it and where … and where it has been shared,” Kahn said.
Around for a while
The first iterations of RPost’s technology came out in 2000, and the company’s first federal government customers came on board for the initial email security platform a few years later. Customers in different sectors signed on in subsequent years.
Now with more than 200 employees, the California-based company has attracted private investors over time, but no formal venture capital backing.
RPost maintains offices in the US, UK, Brazil, elsewhere in Latin America, India, and locations in Europe and the Asia Pacific region.
Ingram Micro, the world’s largest technology distributor, is also a partner, which enables an even wider global reach.
“We’re built into the Ingram micro-ecosystem, where resellers in all corners of the world can access and purchase our technology through their distribution channel for their end customers, Kahn said.
RPost is profitable, Kahn said, “with millions of dollars in EBITA operating profit.”
The main tech ingredients for most of RPost’s platforms include hashing or digital authentication technology for communication between services associated with the sender or receiving of digital platforms.
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“We’re sitting in the background and recording all the underlying internet forensics around that communication,” Kahn said.
Fingerprinting and encryption technologies are also key elements, along with AI-related components that help adapt the user experience based on how the user is interacting with the technology.
Recession proof
While there has been some market turmoil, Kahn said that RPost is growing steadily because of the universal need of security technologies.
“We’re recession proof in the sense that security and compliance, the need for that keeps growing and the complexity around that continues to grow regardless of the economy,” Kahn said. “The difference is whether they’re buying our services for cost-cutting, or for speeding [up] business processes.”
