Spanish Tractis expands to Europe

CEO David Blanco

Spain based Tractis.com is capable of processing digital certificates issued by any certification authority such as a government (i.e: Spanish national ID card), a private company (i.e. Verisign), or a professional association (i.e. Bar Association). Tractis is trying to work with any authentication method: mobile authentication, OpenID, PGP, Biometric, and one-time-tokens. This means you can forget about paper, faxes and fedex to get your documents, contracts and terms edited, approved and signed on-line.

Just last week we spoke with a Venture Capitalist who complained that after they decided to fund a European start-up it took more than a month for all the paperwork to be properly signed because the investor, company and shareholders were based in three different countries in Europe. Tractis successfully solves this problem, and more.

The Tractis interface allows you to create and edit contracts and invite team members to view and edit documents. You also have the ability to mange permissions while you edit, change, review and annotate documents. Tractis isn’t giving out statistics of its use but since it launched in Spain it has been growing steady and they are now launching in several other European countries. David Blanco last night told me “2008 marks the start of our international expansion. We have studied 32 European countries representing 565 million people and plan to launch in several of them throughout 2008″.

He sent me some interesting statistics on the status of electronic IDs:

• 27% of the population of the 32 European countries lives in a country that has an electronic ID (e-ID) scheme (at varying stages of implementation).
• 32% lives in a country that is planning to launch e-IDs in 2008.
• 23% lives in a country that is planning to launch e-IDs after 2008.
• 14% lives in a country that has no plans to launch e-IDs but that does have commercial Certification Authorities (CAs).
• 4% lives in a country that has no plans to launch e-IDs and no commercial CAs

They are currently studying several countries legislation regarding electronic signatures and are preparing to validate certificates issued by Certification Authorities in those countries. They will integrate first with government e-ID schemes.

The first country where they will launch outside of Spain will be Belgium. Other countries such as Portugal and Austria will follow soon after. I can’t wait until they launch in The Netherlands, where we are based. We recently bought a Fujitsu ScanSnap in an effort to get rid of paper in our offices. We scan and then throw away recycle as many documents as possible. Unfortunately we still need paper copies of important documents like contracts. It would be a great relieve to get rid of those too.

[WebTipr: Victor Cruzate, Spain]