‘Pandemic accelerated e-signature adoption’

‘Firms wary of tech took the plunge’

The recent surge in pandemic-induced remote working and social distancing has accelerated the adoption of electronic signatures across a diverse set of industries, use cases and geographies, said Srini Dokka, VP – Global Business Development at MSB Docs, a provider of e-signature technologies and smart document solutions.

Organisations entirely running on paper-based processes, and which had never planned for digitisation, had to take a quick plunge into the digital world during the pandemic to fill the gap in their digital business capabilities and enable business continuity. “This resulted in an acceleration in the adoption of e-signature technologies by organisations that have been reticent to embrace this technology and who used it only for external customer or partner use cases such as contracts and client agreements,” Mr. Dokka said. Social distancing protocols have driven the demand for electronic signatures for providing high assurance for use cases which historically have been performed in person such as paperwork for new hiring, customer agreements and financial services documents.

“These could be documents for individual customers, vendors or partners, but in all of these cases, the contract needs to be signed by someone external to the organisation, putting a greater burden on identity assessment to protect against fraud,” he added. He said while the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of electronic signatures, the digital business processes had already been driving through Application Programming Interface (API) based integrations, feature-rich connectors and plug-ins to other business platforms and a growing number of platform native electronic signature capabilities.

Stressing that the adoption of such technologies are helping in boosting the bottom line of organisations he said, “Our solutions help our customers address their unique needs and impact the top and bottom lines.” “These customised solutions nullify document printing, storage and delivery cost in addition to increased business outcomes and quicker decision-making,” Mr. Dokka said. Electronic signature technologies are today increasingly used to digitise drug discovery, clinical trials, vendor contracts, CRO documentation, and on-boarding paperworks, contracts and agreements, receipts and invoices.