E-signatures are currently experiencing a boom. E-signature has fast evolved into a crucial tool in the new digital workspace as a business is quickly shifting to the cloud and employees are settling into remote offices. It’s a good idea to assess how your company handles signatures as the new year gets underway and think of innovative methods to expand.
We have examined current trends and the development of e-signature recently. Seven forecasts have been made regarding the state of e-signature in 2022 and subsequent years.
Businesses underwent substantial adjustment over the past two years in order to retain continuity and satisfy clients under novel circumstances. For many organizations aiming to transition to remote-friendly operations, e-signature was an easy first step. Nearly two-thirds of companies that use e-signatures today only started doing so in the past two years. Basically, e-signature use has skyrocketed. It is now widely used. Organizations that continue to use antiquated signing procedures will lose a major competitive advantage.
What does that signify for people who utilize e-signatures? The baseline has changed as a result of your rivals catching up. Simple signature procedures are no longer a difference between internal collaboration and outside transactions. You must think more broadly if you want to reclaim the operational advantage. Adding more tools to your trademark stack will improve the experience for both customers and employees. Use integrations to have agreement information filled in automatically rather than just supplying electronic signatures. To avoid duplicating work, utilise templates to create contracts rather than starting from scratch. Verify the signer’s identity digitally. Develop mobile signing, and include SMS alerts for clients. Look for new aspects of the experience that may be enhanced or personalized through integrations or APIs once the bottleneck of ink-and-paper signatures has been eliminated.
E-signature technology is typically held by the teams that are most likely to be involved in digital agreements at today’s modern organizations: legal and IT. According to a recent study, one of these two teams serves as the main point of contact for the internal spread of e-signature in more than 69% of firms. Although it’s possible that legal or IT teams were the ones who initially spearheaded attempts to embrace e-signature. The ownership of the agreement process transcends the purview of any single team.
Every team inside a company will become interested in a portion of the larger e-signature picture. As more agreements are created, negotiated, finished, and kept digitally. HR will aim to make hiring and onboarding processes more efficient. Sales will want to make the creation and approval of contracts simpler. The procurement department will strive to increase its negotiation power with both potential and current vendors. Other teams will become increasingly vested in the success of e-signature, but legal and IT will still be involved as key owners.
There are still several steps in the agreement transaction procedure that must be completed in person. This happens frequently when a third-party witness is required to complete or sign an agreement. Individual signers might need to go through highly inconvenient in-person procedures with documents. It needs to be properly witnessed by a notary public (for example affidavits, powers of attorney). In order to sign an agreement appropriately. There has been a lot of momentum in some regions to acknowledge remote online witnessing services as a workable substitute for in-person encounters because more multi-party transactions must take place without them.
This development won’t stop. Such trends have only one direction of movement. The states and nations that have approved remote electronic witnessing will keep modifying their legal frameworks to address new use cases so they may continue to benefit from a more advanced, effective, and safe digital infrastructure. States and nations that haven’t yet done so will keep an eye on what other areas are doing and shortly follow suit. A significant evolution in remote electronic witnessing services that enables numerous parties to actively engage with important agreements is a remote online notary.
E-signature is much too frequently only used at the very end of the contracting procedure. All parties could draught an agreement, negotiate it in the traditional manner, and then sign it electronically to conclude the process. The potential of this method is still untapped, but it is nevertheless an upgrade over outdated paper-based procedures. The crucial gap-filler in enabling end-to-end digital workflows has recently been identified as the capability to electronically sign papers. A document doesn’t need to be printed, signed, and then scanned anymore.
Employees are accustomed to using a variety of digital tools to carry out tasks in the new hybrid workspace. Workflows for agreements will develop to link various tools into a single end-to-end procedure. The experience of digital signing will no longer be restricted to merely signatures. Additionally, it will permit real-time joint contract changes and host virtual conversations (using video or chat tools). People will be able to accomplish more with this new setup and the many technologies they are already familiar with. Additionally, it will enable businesses to boost the current staff’s digital toolbox, which translates to improved white-glove customer service that will right away become a competitive difference.
Organizations in any sector can fundamentally alter how they conduct business by streamlining agreement procedures in order to get rid of annoying inefficiencies. The move toward digitization has made it harder to tolerate the bottlenecks, mistakes, and delays of workflows as they are now. Employees are equally as interested in efficiency benefits in processes that interact with customers. Teams that act swiftly to adopt information processing methods that are simpler, faster, and more integrated will experience significant cost savings.
Enterprises digitized and automated the loan fulfillment and onboarding procedures after recognizing a chance to leverage new technologies to alleviate client pain points. The bank cut the time it took to apply for loans by 83% by using interfaces and APIs to create a completely integrated digital lending workflow. Santander’s digital-first environment attracted a lot of contemporary clients, which led to a 10x increase in the number of loans processed.
Looking forward, creating a system of agreement with a series of standalone point solutions is not a sustainable solution. Each new product that is added to the agreement stack is another opportunity for incongruence, delays, and costs. Every transition from one product to another is a potential failure point. Rather than look for the best tool for a specific agreement step, step back and plan for a digital toolkit that offers the most end-to-end functionality with the fewest number of vendors. Companies that provide agreement tools will also respond, either by integrating with other companies or increasing their set of features.