SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Docufide, Inc. today announced that it has changed its corporate name to Parchment Inc. The name change reflects the company’s strategy to both transform the way education credentials are exchanged and used by education institutions, and to empower individuals, throughout their lives, to personally store, share, and put to work their education credentials.
“Just as the ancient world relied on parchment to memorialize its record-keeping, success in today’s economy depends on up-to-date, reliable, and accessible academic credentials,” said Matthew Pittinsky, Parchment’s Chief Executive Officer. Pittinsky, co-founder of Blackboard Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBB), the technology platform that has enhanced the learning experience of tens of millions of students, parents, and teachers, sees a comparable challenge with Parchment – but one “where the economic and societal stakes are even higher.”
“The way the education credentials infrastructure of our society works today is in many ways the same model as in the ancient world,” explained Pittinsky. “Transcripts for a single person are fragmented across the various education and training institutions they attend; they are exchanged in paper; and treated as symbols of specific arbitrary achievements, not direct accounts of what someone has learned and how well they learned it; and few individuals are able to truly take control of their credentials and put them to work. In a knowledge economy, simply put, this is inefficient and unsustainable.”
“Our goal with Parchment is to revolutionize the way high schools, colleges, students, and prospective employers use and share academic credentials by unlocking the valuable data they embody,” said John Reese, Parchment’s Chairman and co-Founder. “At Parchment, we have a simple goal: to empower individuals by making their academic credentials work as hard for them as they worked to earn them. Too often in today’s archaic paper-based system, that’s impossible.” Parchment’s logo, Reese pointed out, is an origami bird that represents the paper education credential transformed and taking flight. Parchment’s tagline, also unveiled today, is “Credentials Unleashed.”™
The Docufide Software-as-a-Service (SaS) platform will retain the Docufide brand. Since its inception in 2003, Docufide (now Docufide by Parchment) has served as “Education's Trusted Intermediary.”™. Docufide licenses two modules: “Docufide Sender,” which electronically capturers, transforms, and manages education credentials for K-12 schools and universities; and “Docufide Receiver,” which delivers millions of transcripts and other education credentials each year to colleges, universities, and other recipients in the format of their choice, while integrating their application and admissions workflow.
Docufide by Parchment is the largest network for academic credentials in the world, with over 7,000 high schools, colleges and universities, and hundreds of thousands of individuals exchanging millions of transcripts and other student records. The company has been selected by 11 states to provide the infrastructure for electronic exchange initiatives. Docufide’s network of senders and receivers also includes the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), all of the Common Application member colleges.