Case Study: Putting the “Secure” in Rolo’s Secure B2B Communication App

For decades, email has been the B2B digital communication tool of choice for most companies. While corporate email features the organizational management and audit trail that companies need, it is inherently insecure, lacking any sort of encryption by default. Over the past 10 years, consumer-focused instant messaging apps have grown in popularity, even in the business world. These apps tend to have higher levels of security than email, with many offering end-to-end encryption, but they fundamentally lack organizational management and audit trail features.

From India to Israel, from Singapore to the United States, buyers and sellers casually communicate on business matters using consumer apps such as WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or Line. Those applications are convenient, but the problem arises when a company needs to access or audit those business communications made with their employee private accounts. It is legally and ethically difficult to enforce. In addition to the confidentiality risk and the lack of auditability, the problem amplifies when an employee leaves, putting your company at a high risk of data loss or data leakage.

Convenience has taken over business confidentiality and accountability. It’s an issue that has long troubled Momday Dok, Co-Founder and CEO of international startup Rolo Innovation Inc.

“Rolo is highly-focused on the confidentiality, control, and auditability of an organization’s communications, yet simple to use with minimal maintenance,” Dok explains. “Secure communication is the building block of a successful business, but existing business chat applications are either too expensive or too complicated to use and maintain for most SMEs. No other chat apps enable business-to-business communication in the way Rolo does.”

“Rolo is highly-focused on security, confidentiality, and data control,” Dok explains. “Secure communication is the building block of a successful business, yet there is no commonly known market-leader for messaging apps that enable business-to-business communication in the way Rolo does. It’s a need that isn’t fulfilled by any current applications.”

Using the BlackBerry® Spark Communications Services as a foundation, Rolo raised US$1 million in seed funding to build a secure B2B chat app for SMEs. A development platform designed to embed end-to-end secure communication into apps and smart devices, BlackBerry Spark Communications Services provides digital signing, end-to-end encryption, and integrity checks on all messages, ensuring they cannot be modified in transit. Rolo has wrapped this world-class security around its application’s instant messaging, audio/video calling, and file transfer functionality.

“By using BlackBerry Spark Communications Services to power the secure communication of our chat app, we easily saved almost a year of man-hours in the platform’s development,” says Alex Trup, Rolo COO and Co-Founder. “We also built our app to be as simple to use as possible. You can simply enter the email address of the client or team member you wish to contact and send them a message, which is then instantly secured with the help of BlackBerry Spark Communications Services.”

Rolo’s beta version of its chat app is available on both iOS® and Android™, and a web browser version is coming soon.

“BlackBerry is a strong brand,” concludes Dok. “There are other enterprise messaging applications on the market, but none of them have the background BlackBerry offers, or the branding BlackBerry has. It’s all about security, confidentiality, and accountability for your business.”

BlackBerry Spark Communication Services is a ready-made secure global IP based communication solution for developers, with industry leading security, privacy, and authenticity built in as a ready-to-integrate solution for ISV’s, for enterprise-ready voice, video, file sharing and group messaging functionality.

Learn more about Rolo, or view the video case study.