Benzinga | Mar 22, 2021 01:00PM EDT

WISeKey Reports Selected By Billion Group To Provide MPKI Services For Trusted Remote Document Signing With Blockchain

WISeKey International Holding ((&ldquo, WISeKey, &rdquo, SIX: WIHN, NASDAQ:WKEY), a leading cybersecurity, AI and IoT company, today announced that is has signed a collaboration agreement with Billon Group, a provider of the Unified Enterprise DLT (distributed ledger technology). The collaboration brings together Billon's DLT system, often used for tokenizing and transacting national currency and processing sensitive data, and WISeKey's Managed Public Key Infrastructure (MPKI) services to address complex security, privacy, and efficiency challenges in today's global economic and social environment.

The agreement marks a significant advancement in trusted remote document signing, an approach increasingly important to businesses and organizations. The benefits of this collaboration agreement become even more important during the COVID-19 pandemic as many companies affected by the global shutdown are now struggling to build recovery strategies and governments are working to re-open their economies. Global e-signature market generated revenue of $951.3 million in 2019; this market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 24.6% from 2020 to 2030.

While many blockchain technologies advance the security of electronic transactions by making them immutable, most struggle to verify offline transactions, confer legal validity, and regulate digital signatures. Furthermore, most of existing blockchain technologies lack a consistent approach to ensuring the identity of the participants in a transaction.

WISeKey's MPKI solution using trusted digital certificates is designed to bridge these gaps in blockchain implementations, and when used together with Billon's Trusted Document Management solution, can deliver tangible business results, and solve legal validity issues by making offline validations possible (i.e., using standards like XAdES or PAdES). The combined solution offers digitally signed security to represent the Trusted Digital Identities of participants in the transaction, and it is scalable, interoperable, and legally binding.



"Current platforms for remote contract signing use email and SMS to identify parties. These do not provide an absolute guarantee that the contract is executed by the right parties. The identification methods used by Billon and advanced certificates issued by WISeKey, Billon's trusted partner, give greater certainty and better audibility of the remote signing process. The remote document signing capability of Billon's Trusted Document Management solution, which leverages the advantages of blockchain and PKI, can be successfully used to process all kinds of contracts in international trade, ensuring the highest level of data and document security," commented Bogumia Cebeliska-Woniak, Trusted Document Management Product Director of Billon Group. "This integration is a practical proof point of the synergies that can be generated between blockchain and PKI, two technologies typically considered antagonists."

Billion will use WISeKey's WISeID platform as a MPKI solution to enroll users and generate valid digital certificates for document signatures, thereby enabling their DLT system to produce, when required in the transaction flow, legally binding proof points.

WISeID is based on the WISeKey/OISTE Root of Trust and integrates innovative technologies to distribute the identity attributes and build federated ecosystems.

"We are delighted by this opportunity to integrate our cutting-edge technologies to provide two vital features: (1) the required cybersecurity in the context of digital transformation processes and (2) a legal proof point via an electronic signature in line with the regulations to support compliance," commented Carlos Moreno, VP Corporate Alliances and Partnerships of WISeKey. "This is a business information exchange built on revolutionary security of immutable blockchain data."