Wells Fargo bank customers will soon be able to use digital signatures and Adobe PDF documents to conduct sensitive business transactions.

Wells Fargo is planning to deploy a service called SimpleSign that combines Adobe Systems' Acrobat technology with digital identity services from Identrus. The service is designed to prevent document spoofing and allows banks and their customers to sign PDF documents with digital signatures, creating legally binding digital documents like loan origination forms and letters of credit.

If widely adopted in the U.S., the SimpleSign service could make it faster and cheaper for banks and other financial institutions to process documents, said Clay Epstein, vice president of product and technology at Identrus, which is based in San Francisco.

Wells Fargo has been using the SimpleSign technology for three or four months in a pilot test with a number of other U.S. banks and will soon roll out the service across its business units and international businesses run by the bank, according to Epstein.

Wells Fargo did not respond to a request for comment.

Identrus is a network of about 60 banks worldwide that promotes a legal infrastructure and open technology platform for digital identity services including identity authentication and digital signatures. The system counts Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Barclays Bank, Chase Manhattan Bank and Citigroup as members and is designed to provide a stable technology and legal foundation for electronic-financial transactions, independent of differing national laws governing the use of digital credentials, according to Identrus.

The Identrus technology platform is based on standard X.509 digital certificates and Online Certificate Status Protocol for exchanging and validating online signatures, with each bank in the system acting as its own certificate authority, Epstein said.

Acrobat Version 6.0 products recognize and accept Identrus digital certificates, using them and Acrobat's built-in digital signing features to verify documents and prevent document spoofing. When signed documents are received by Indentrus, OCSP requests sent to the certificate authority immediately confirm the document's authenticity, Epstein said.

"The real-time validation mechanism is important to banks. An individual document can always be sent from somebody who claims to be Citibank, Wells Fargo or Chase. By using a document signed by the bank and verified by a trusted party like Identrus, (SimpleSign) provides an anti-spoofing function," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.