[BERLIN] - 17 February 2005: Frank Fuchs, Managing Director of SOFTPRO GmbH (Softpro), has been honoured by the Economic Forum Germany with the 2005 National Leadership Award for Information Technology. The award, which is in the gift of a high profile jury, recognises outstanding leaders who have both successfully conceived and executed innovative plans. The award winners include member of parliament Hildegard Mueller (CDU), Berlin Senator Thilo Sarrazin (SPD) and previous Minister Christian Schwarz-Schilling.
The German Economic Forum has emerged as the leading cross-party platform for representatives from economics, politics and research. Its mission is to promote both an entrepreneurial environment and strengthen Germany's competitive position. Each year, the Forum selects outstanding leaders or opinion makers in a number of sectors which include Banking & Financial services, Automotive, Manufacturing, IT & Multimedia, Telecommunications & Internet and Business Start Ups.
Frank Fuchs is the Managing Director and Chief Technology Officer of Softpro, which is the leading provider of signature verification solutions, world-wide. The business develops software for the capture and verification of handwritten signatures and transforms this technology into solutions for security, authentication and paper elimination in documents and processes across a wide range of industries. Softpro currently employs 60 people to serve over 250 customers in banking, insurance and healthcare from its offices in Germany, USA, UK and Singapore.
Frank Fuchs is 40 years old, married with three children and has led technology development at Softpro since 1987. Since January 2005 he has also been operationally responsible for the Biometric Division within Softpro.
Founded in 1983 by Heinz Reschke the company initially developed individual software solutions for various industries. Visual comparison of signatures supported by PCs was started in 1987, triggered by growing demand from major financial institutions. Shortly after this, SOFTPRO - along with IBM and APP Informatik Davos - started the development of automatic signature verification. The automatic verification is based on a neural network and fuzzy logic. The first automatic solution went into production in 1994. Patent rights for the automatic verification were acquired from IBM in 1998. In recent years SOFTPRO extended its product range through the use and verification of dynamic (biometric) characteristics of signatures. These new products won the German "Microsoft Tablet PC Challenge" in 2004 as well as the best Biometric application for Tablet PCs in Microsoft's world-wide competition "Does Your App Think in Ink?"
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.
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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, Citigroup, Discover Financial, Ingolstadt Hospital, JPMorgan Chase, 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, health/pharma, 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 shareholders are GE Capital (since 1998), AdCapital (since 2001) founders and management.
SOFTPRO's partners include: A2iA, Adobe, Beta Systems (Kleindienst), Disoft, Fujitsu Siemens Computers / Fujitsu, Gateway, Gijima AST, HP, IBM, Interlink, Lenovo, Microsoft, Motion Computing, Toshiba, TeleCash (First Data), Unisys and Wacom as well as APP Informatik Davos.
Please contact us for additional information:
SOFTPRO GmbH
Wilhelmstrasse 34
71034 Boeblingen
Germany
Phone: +49 7031 6606 0
Fax: +49 7031 6606 66
Joerg-M. Lenz
Manager PR
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