IM lends secure connections

In the commercial real estate lending business, getting through to the right person within seconds can mean the difference between closing a deal and watching it slip away.

Joe Forman, COO and principal of Bond Street Capital, found that instant messaging became a golden key of sorts in opening up communication among the company’s brokers and with vital banker clients outside the firewall.

“When you have to reach someone who is constantly on the phone, IM is incredibly valuable,” Forman says.

Forman first started with free consumer grade products from America Online and Microsoft’s MSN Messenger. With MSN Messenger, employees at Bond Street Capital fell in love with the immediacy of IM, but Forman grew increasingly fearful of viruses and of security risks associated with running private messages over a public network.

Furthermore, when the opportunity arrived to extend IM out to the company’s most important banker clients, Forman learned the banks wouldn’t — and couldn’t — interact with insecure public IM systems.

“We wanted lenders to have access to us through IM, but none of them would go near it on the public systems,” Forman says. “It’s really important to access [lenders] in a split second to get a deal closed.”

Enter WiredRed’s e/pop IM system, which let Bond Street Capital establish a private and secure IM network behind its firewall. The IM network could also be extended to lender banks via a ten minute process involving a client download and the assigning of an IP address and user passwords, Forman says.

“Banks are very fearful of [viruses] and security,” he says. “I [went] to the IT guys at the lenders and proved the security case to them.”

Furthermore, IM provided a way to route large commercial loan documents to brokers and lenders without succumbing to e-mail server attachment size limits.

“We move large documents around and would find them being blocked by e-mail servers,” Forman said.

Before selecting WiredRed, Forman experimented with other products, including IBM’s Lotus Instant Messaging (formerly Sametime). He found WiredRed was easier to deploy and was a better fit for Bond Street Capital’s needs, which were limited to IM and file transfer.

“It took 15 minutes to load the WiredRed server,” Forman says.

Forman says IM has largely displaced e-mail, and now comprises the majority of the company’s electronic communications.

“E/pop is now used 70 percent of the time instead of e-mail. It’s instant, contained, and safer,” Forman says. “Now [IM] is an ingrained part of how we do business. It is amazing how effective it is.”