E-Signatures—What Starts Digital, Stays Digital

It is difficult to talk about managing enterprise content without mentioning electronic signatures. E-signatures make it possible to create end-to-end digital workflows. They help maximize ROI from ECM, while enhancing productivity, compliance, security and analytics. For these reasons, we’re seeing a spike in e-signature implementations with storage and collaboration tools like Box, Microsoft SharePoint and other ECM technologies.

Business Value

In a 2014 AIIM survey of the financial and insurance sectors, 41% of respondents indicated that removing paper from all business processes is seen as a key corporate objective for performance improvement.

Electronic signatures, digital business and ECM are interdependent. Without e-signature capability, documents continue to be printed for signing, then photocopied, shipped, corrected, imaged back into the system, archived and shredded. The good news is, as much as 90% of the time and cost of administrative labor dedicated to managing paper can be offset through e-signatures. Not to mention benefits like faster decision-making, shorter sales cycles and improved customer experience.

Case in point: RBC Royal Bank. According to ITbusiness, “Instead of printing a voluminous agreement for a client to put wet ink on, only to rescan it into the ECM system later, the signature is captured on a digital pad. ‘During peak periods we’re saving two to three hours per week per advisor,’ says Keith Wilson, senior manager of sales force technology enablement at RBC. ‘With 8,000 advisors, that is about 24,000 hours per week in time saved.’”

Compliance

In the last few years, e-transactions have been embraced by the financial services, insurance, healthcare and real estate industries, as well as all levels of government. A major driver is compliance and risk. Many organizations are concerned about legal risk or they struggle with the constantly changing regulatory landscape in their industries, in part because manual processing is so error-prone. But rather than react to regulatory pressures with additional people, manual controls and process complexity, businesses that adopt e-signatures:

• Leverage workflow rules to execute transactions correctly and consistently;
• Capture a full audit trail and electronic evidence;
• Minimize exposure to risk due to misplaced or lost documentation; and
• Make the process of e-discovery easier, more reliable and less expensive.

In addition, e-signature solutions (such as e-SignLive) make it easy to demonstrate compliance and reduce legal risk through the ability to playback the exact process that was used to capture signatures. Imagine the VP of compliance asking for transaction records from five years ago. How helpful would it be to quickly produce all the signed records, in good order, AND replay the entire Web-based signing process for context?

How E-signatures Fit Within ECM Systems

As explained by Forrester Research in a report entitled E-Signatures—A Few Simple Best Practices Drive Adoption, “E-signature solutions start with a document set produced from a core system, packaged app, or the cloud. The e-signature solution grabs the signable document… and adds required signing features. Once signed, the document ends up (with electronic evidence) in a business app or ECM platform. E-signature platforms need to integrate with these front- and back-end systems.”

Consider an insurance application as an example. Customer data is captured and application forms are filled out. When the package is ready to be signed by the customer, traditionally it would revert to paper. Instead, documents are handed off to the electronic signature solution. The solution then manages every aspect of the e-sign process, including notifying and authenticating signers, presenting documents for review, capturing intent, securing the documents, collecting evidence and more.

Once e-signed, the documents can be downloaded in PDF format (an ISO standard) and stored in any archiving system. The e-signature audit trail and the security travels seamlessly with the document, ensuring the record can be verified independently of the e-signature service. A document-centric approach to embedding e-signatures within signed records allows for greater portability and easier long term storage in an ECM solution. Additional metadata related to the e-sign transaction can be handed off to the ECM as well for analytics purposes.

Getting Started

Contrary to what some might think, adopting electronic signatures can be quick and easy and does not require IT or programming resources. Sign up for e-signatures and you can upload and start sending out documents today. For companies who might be looking for a more integrated, automated workflow, e-signature plugins for Microsoft SharePoint, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM or Box are available. Businesses can quickly and easily enhance approval workflows with a more robust e-signature solution than a checkbox on an approval routing sheet, while also automating archival. To learn more: www.silanis.com