The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Bill, awaiting President Clinton's digital signature to be signed into law, could prove to be a windfall for several vendors that provide digital certificates, including Baltimore Technologies.

The Bill, passed unanimously by the US Senate, gives contracts and other agreements that are concluded electronically, the same legal standing as paper contracts.

"Historically, people tended to view this as a security issue," said Mr Scott Lowry, president and chief executive officer of Digital Signature Trust Company, a four-year-old subsidiary of Zions First National Bank of Salt Lake City, Utah.

"The advent of the Bill shifts it fundamentally into a re-engineering process. Now you can do an online loan," he said.

According to Mr Patrick Holahan, executive vice-president of marketing at Baltimore Technologies: "There will be thousands of applications that will be digital signature-enabled or time stamped."

There were many forms of electronic signature, Mr Holahan said, but "public key infrastructure technology is the current best way to do digital signing". The law, he said, "will be extremely good for our business".

Utah is often cited as the country's digital signature pacesetter, with a comprehensive law in 1995 that resulted in the pioneering designation of Digital Signature Trust as the first registered certificate authority in the United States.

Since then, digital signatures have become recognised in 46 US states with legislation pending in the other four. The new Act will give recognition to electronic signatures, contracts and records uniformly throughout the US.

Over the past two years, many companies - particularly those in financial services - have taken applications online but an applicant was always required to physically sign documents.

"The digital signature legislation obviates this need and creates a legally binding agreement online, so it's a paperless deal," Mr Lowry said.

Vendors like Verisign, Entrust Technologies and Baltimore "are the silk screeners and embossers of this business", Mr Lowry said. "They manufacture digital certificates. We're at the end of the food chain and we say here's what the certificate can be used for," he said. Each issuing institution can determine its own use for certificates.

Several companies had been piloting digital certificates internally but now that the Act has been passed, "we'll see a major explosion in their use", he said.

The federal government's General Services Administration has signed a three-year contract with Digital Signature Trust to issue digital certificates and digital signatures for any kind of electronic transaction or document transfer between government agencies and the US public.

This means, for example, digital certificates could be used to file social security, tax forms or in suppliers' bids for government contracts.

A co-ordinated standard eliminates the need and expense for each government agency to set up its own certification system.

"For the 24 by seven, real-time nature of the Internet, giving people paper documents flies in the face of Internet applications," said Mr Anil Pereira, vice-president of the Internet services group at Mountain View, California-based Verisign.

"The new Bill allows the acceleration of electronic commerce applications in the business-to-business and business-to-consumer space.

"Now financial institutions have the ability to issue digital certificates to their customers, to authenticate them with a onetime issued digital certificate and to offer them a whole host of services from auto loans to mortgages."