eSignature service

Industries That Can Benefit From eSignature Solutions

Moving fast in business is crucial for survival! You move slowly, and the rising competition devours your market share. eSignature solutions help companies to minimize delays with paperwork and move things faster. They cut the turnaround time by 90%, which means a document can be signed and shared online even before the ink dries on the paper. Apart from these benefits, they allow businesses to work smartly, save money, boost productivity without using the costly, time-consuming age-old processes.

Investment in eSignature service is the best bet for organizations that want to blast past these issues and speed up their digital transformation journey.

Here are the industries that can benefit immensely from eSignature solutions.

eCommerce Industry

Is there anything familiar between eCommerce and electronic signatures? Both have closer ties with each other and are dependent on the internet for smooth business operations.

The sole credit of the eCommerce industry getting into a monstrous growth phase (USD 4.28 Trillion worldwide), breaking national boundaries, and reaching genuine customers goes to electronic signature solutions.

eSignatures have entirely changed the way eCommerce companies do business with customers.

Here is how they complement each other!

Every order on an eCommerce website is like an online business contract initiated when the buyer places an order. The open contract is closed when the buyer acknowledges the product receipt with an electronic signature.

The plan of using an eSignature application is evident here.

Its use means genuine company representatives are delivering the ordered product on behalf of the company, and there are minimal chances of the order getting duplicated and misplaced.

Another critical point is that if a business is present in other geographical locations, the company needs not seek the customer’s signature on a physical document as consent to the contract. When you esign the document using an eSignature solution, you can instantly use it as an agreement signed by both parties.

You are miles ahead of the competition in a tough eCommerce market as your customers get the impression that they are doing business with a trusted company.

This way, eSignatures provide a critical way to boost online branding, gain positive word-of-mouth marketing, and enhance Customer Experience (CX).

Banking Industry

Implementing eSignatures in the banking industry can save an astonishing 1.3 hours per transaction! As they are efficient and track documents very fast.

Banks adopt eSignature solutions in daily business operations to offer a better customer experience and digitize their processes.

Here are some ways banks can benefit from using e-signatures:

Minimize transaction time: It allows banks to process a good number of transactions within a short period

Ensures document security: If your bank uses esignature solutions, you don’t have to worry as esigned documents are stored securely in the cloud storage.

Streamline Internal process: Banks can eliminate all time-consuming steps involved in paperwork as you don’t have to print, scan and mail the documents.

Improved customer loyalty: eSignature solutions give clarity, transparency & excellent efficiency in a bank’s internal processes allowing customers to reach them for more services, thereby improving customer loyalty.

Telecommunication Industry

If an industry has truly capitalized and received immense competitive benefits from electronic signature, then the credit goes to the telecommunication industry.

When the world embraced 4G technology, they needed to acquire customers in mass numbers to justify the infrastructure costs.

But the biggest Achilles heel of this industry was manual document processing as companies received connection requests from lakhs & lakhs of applicants every day. Activating these connections in a few hours and providing them the selected services at the right time was like daydreaming.

Then the telecom industry adopted eSignature technology, which completely changed the scene. Here is how it has benefitted from electronic signatures:

Fastest Customer Acquisition: Process KYC documents in a matter of minutes instead of days.

Pleasant Customer experience: What is more pleasing than seeing your applied services getting activated before your own eyes? You apply for a sim today and enjoy voice and internet services the same day.

Contract Signups and renewals: B2B customers sign their contract online on a paperless document with real-time approvals on contract and eForms.

Tamper-proof documents: Digital signatures are tamper-proof as they use highly secured encryption technology.

Ensures compliance: Electronic signature confirms to ESIGN, eIDAS and IT signature act making it suitable for intercontinental business.

Here is a live example of Reliance Jio using electronic signatures to acquire 20 Million customers in a month.

Insurance Industry

Insurance is the second industry after telecommunication searching for new customers to add to its business. The more customers, the greater is the month-on-month revenue.

But the main challenges faced by them are reducing costs, increasing turnaround, and profitability.

To overcome these challenges and remain relevant in the market, these companies have started deploying electronic signatures as a proven solution to acquire online customers securely, build engagement and grow customer loyalty.

The benefits of implementing eSignature for the insurance industry are:

  • Sign new/existing insurance policies with speed and accuracy
  • Super convenient for clients as they can quickly sign and retain copies of their signed policies
  • Get new customers with ease leading to more significant improvement in productivity of field agents
  • Reduce chances of errors by securing your insurance document flow
  • Get a considerable return on investment (ROI) by saving paper, mailing costs, and back-office processing
  • Boosts up brand image in the market as an eco-friendly company
  • One of the most significant benefits of eSignature is that it helps reveal the identify the signer
  • It helps save your office space as you don’t need printing and scanning machines

Construction Industry

Do you know that the global construction market would grow to USD 8 Trillion by 2030? There is an incredible opportunity to be a part of this boom and climb the ladders of success.

The construction industry has tonnes of paperwork- contracts, material sourcing, paid bills, unpaid bills, builder-customer agreements, employee records, bank agreements, construction project management, and a lot more.

According to a recent study by the World Economic Forum (WEF), full-scale digitalization within ten years is capable of producing annual global cost savings of USD 0.7-1.2 Trillion (13-21%) on Engineering & Construction and USD 0.3-0.5 Trillion (10-17%) in the Operations phase.

Electronic Signatures are an essential weapon in swiftly ensuring the digital shift.

You can barely escape from paperwork! Whether the construction company is a smaller company or a larger company, contracts and agreements form part of everyday work. The most important thing is to keep all the records safe for years & years, preventing them from misuse and getting destroyed.

LunarPen eSignature applications are born to handle these situations pretty well.

Here is how LunarPen eSignature helps the construction industry:

  • Stores all documents in one place and keeps construction industry contracts completely secure
  • Eliminates the risk of construction project delays by getting required signatures from engineers, managers, and contractors
  • Process construction company documents in the most efficient way by uploading, eSigning, and emailing the documents
  • Prevents forgery of essential documents and contracts as online documents are accessible only to authorized users

Law Firms Industry

The law firm industry is worth USD 300 Billion a year. It provides expertise on various practices, including business law, criminal law, commercial law, tax law, intellectual property, and real estate.

It involves loads of paperwork hassles that are always a pain and needs due care for document creation, usage, security, and storage.

Paperless electronically signed documents simplify the process of document signing and increase document safety.

Here are the main benefits of electronic signature in the law firm industry:

Time Management: LunarPen eSignature application saves a lot of time doing manual tasks like printing, scanning, mailing, and storing the documents.

Cost savings: It considerably reduces the amount of paper needed for printing, scanning, copying, and mailing documents.

Security: It offers the highest level of protection than a paper contract due to encryption technology, allowing verification of every signer and maintaining the chain of custody.

Client conversion rate: It allows to increase the conversion rate for retaining new clients by signing with the organization immediately at the first intake.

Use from anywhere: Your clients won’t have to take work off to come in and sign documents that are essential to their matters. They go to their email and can review and sign their documents quickly.

Protects confidential documents: It helps protect personal information with secure electronic storage. Your clients will love how fast and easy it is to sign documents with eSignatures.

Legally Enforceable: Electronic signatures used for signing online documents are legally enforceable by law.

Conclusion

The growing list of companies and industrial sectors using eSignature solutions is undeniable proof of its adoption in day-to-day business operations. Take the name of any industry, and you can see the way companies are using this technology to speed up business processes, boost productivity and win consumer confidence. Electronic signatures are a dream come true for companies trying to reduce operational costs and increase market share without constraint on a company’s existing resources.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three benefits of a digital signature?

The three main benefits of using electronic signatures are enhanced security, lower transaction costs, and speed.

What is an eSignature example?

Examples of electronic signatures are

  • Using an ePen to create a signature on a touch screen device,
  • Using your fingers to draw your signature on smartphone or tablets
  • Using the mouse to remove your name as a signature on desktop or laptop
  • Signature at the bottom of your email
  • Typing your name as a signature
  • Scanned images of a signature

Is email an electronic signature?

The components of an electronic signature are

  • Your name
  • Name of company
  • Role in the company
  • Contact details
  • Website URL of the company
  • Your photo or a company logo

What is the symbol for electronic signature?

An S-signature is an electronic signature formed by forwarding slashes that include any non-handwritten signature (i.e., electronic or mechanical).

Posted by Lunar Pen in eSignaure Law, 0 comments

Best Practices of Electronic Signature Security

Electronic signature security is one of the top concerns of digital transactions as more and more businesses empower customers to make secure and faster transactions on the web. When you collaborate with an eSignature vendor, don’t look for an eSignature service that is ESIGN compliant or has a particular security specification. We recommend you to take a broader view of the e-signature security that also addresses:

  • Selecting appropriate authentication levels
  • Making esigned documents tamper-proof
  • Easier verification of esigned documents
  • Reliability of records independent of the vendor
  • Verifying vendor’s track record of protecting customer’s data
  • Creating trusted experience through white labeling

Such a focused multi-directional strategy protects the organization’s reputation, reinstates customer confidence, and reduces the risk of non-compliance fines in electronic signature security.

To identify the esignature security requirements against which you should evaluate solutions, you should proactively check these security best practices before finalizing and working with an esignature vendor.

Best practices for implementing Electronic Signature Security

Identification, Authentication, and Attribution

Identification: The identification process identifies first-time applicants using two types of information:

  • Personally Identifiable Information(PII) like Driving license, Aadhaar Card, Passport number
  • Nonpublic Personal Information(NPI) like credit score, income, social security number

You get Verified PII or NPI information through third-party identification services. In this case, look for an e-signature solution provider that smoothly integrates with third-party identity verification services to establish genuine esignature users’ identities.

Authentication: Once a signer’s identity is verified, organizations issue electronic credentials to the users to facilitate secure digital transactions. The organization dealing with high-value, high-risk business transactions use robust multi-factor authentication services to ensure a safe environment and protect identities, data, and digital lives.

In this case, look for an e-signature solution that easily integrates with authentication services and offers a wide range of authentication options for a smoother user experience like:

  • User authentication through user id and password
  • User authentication using secret Questions & Answer (Q&A)
  • Using e-Sign sessions for verification of email address
  • Uploading identification images for e-sign transaction

Attribution: Use the attribution process to prove the identity of the person who clicked to apply an esignature.

One of the quickest and cost-effective ways to establish attribution is to use affidavits.

Take a case where the signer has to click a button to e-sign a document on the agent’s device. Just before handing over the device’s control to the signer, the device handling agent or representative gets an affidavit text confirming that the signer has received the esignature device. The affidavit text successfully captures the transfer of control as a part of the audit trail.

Another easier way is to send a one-time passcode (OTP) via SMS text to the signer’s Smartphone for gaining access to the e-sign session.

Document and electronic signature security

The security of electronic signature and the esigned documents are equally crucial for a signed contract.

There are several points for consideration:

  • Electronic signature and the esigned documents must be secured using the digital signature security technology that creates a digital fingerprint of the signed document ( called a hash) used for verifying the integrity of the signed records. If there is an attempt to tamper with the documents, the electronic signature is visibly invalidated.
  • If signers esign a document on different days, then a comprehensive audit trail should include each signature’s date and time.
  • All electronic signatures, timestamps, and audit trails should be embedded directly within the document rather than stored separately in the cloud.
  • It must be easy to verify that there are no changes in the signed record, independent of the vendor.
  • One should avoid e signature solutions that require you to access servers to verify the signature or documents. It can pose significant problems for you if the subscription services stop or the e signature vendor goes out of business.

LunarPen uses audit trails to store and track every change in the document starting from tracking the date of signing a document to change signs in the document and retrieve data anytime for legal purposes.

Cloud Security

eSignature solutions are available both on-premises and in the cloud.

The on-premises esignature solution runs entirely within the company’s network without the need for any external connection to keep the data on-site. On the other hand, a growing number of companies are adopting cloud storage to access documents for esignature transactions as it is speedy and cost-effective. However, it comes with several security risks like data privacy, shared servers, data leakage, and lack of data backups.

It would be best to look after esignature vendors that provide tailor-made secure storage solutions as per the organization’s need.

LunarPen understands these security risks very well and has partnered with leading cloud infrastructure service providers like Onedrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox to access documents securely and send them for e signature to respective signers and signees in a few seconds.

These cloud solutions follow world-class SSL and Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) encryption systems. With PFS, a user can’t reuse a private SSL key for sessions that have occurred in the past. Even if an unauthorized person gets access to the SSL key, it isn’t easy to decrypt older traffic, making cloud solutions highly safe for day-to-day business transactions.

Use white labeling to safeguard signing service & customers against phishing attacks

Enhancing customer experience is the prime focus area of digital transformation. Organizations often depend on third-party solutions to support their day-to-day business process. A slight mistake ruins customer experience, leaks confidential information, and endangers the company’s finances that can tarnish its image.

So, a company must safeguard itself, its clients, and the brand name by ensuring a safe and transparent online transaction process.

The best practice is to white label the entire e-signing experience so that only your brand is visible across the transaction and not the vendor’s brand. White labeling prevents fraudsters from attacking your valuable customers through phishing emails.

Organizations should look for esignature service providers that enable the use of white labeling in esign process.

As a responsible esignature company, LunarPen recommends white labeling in every aspect of the esign process.

The best esignature solution service provider should allow you to

  • Use the company’s email servers to send direct emails and not through third-party service providers.
  • Customize the brand’s logo, theme color & visibility of header, footer, navigation bar,
  • Personalize the content, look & sound of email notifications
  • Customize dialog boxes and error messages

Case Study: How Hackers used fake DocuSign email for phishing

Hackers used DocuSign documents to steal user credentials from all the major email providers.

The attack began when a user received an unknown email that appeared to be from DocuSign as it included its original company logo and the email content seemed like real emails sent from the company.

The email’s first line didn’t have any recipient’s name and only mentioned “Good day.”

Cofence, phishing detection, and response platform analyzed the email header. They realized that the threat source originated from an unknown domain narndeo-tech.com owned by Hetzner, a well-known web hosting service provider and data center operator in Germany.

Its researchers found an embedded hyperlink pointing towards six different options for users to enter their credentials and access DocuSign documents. Fake login pages were recreated for Ms. Outlook, Office 365, Gmail, and Apple iCloud so that users enter and reveal their original login credentials.

It is the best example of a phishing case where cybercriminals used a well-known company’s brand name to steal customer information using emails.

LunarPen strongly advises its users to be extremely cautious when using an external link on an email that asks them to share their user credentials.

If you are keen on learning more about the electronic signature security checklist, click here.

Conclusion

When businesses implement an e-signature solution, It is always advisable to take a broad view of the electronic signature security, starting from identification, authentication and ending with the solution provider’s ability to build trust and a smooth user experience.

Trusted service means stringent security measures. But at the same time, the security level of an esignature solution should not conflict with the customer experience. It is important to balance security concerns with the solution usability as over-engineering can negatively affect solution adoption and usability.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an eSign document?

eSign document means an electronically signed document in PDF, Doc, Xls formats. Such documents are signed using an ePen, mouse, or finger movement on any smartphone, laptop & Tablet securely using an e signature app protected by 256-bit HTTPS advanced encryption.

What is the purpose of esigning a document?

Its purpose is to authenticate and quickly identify the person who has initiated the written communication and ensure a secure exchange of information between different parties. The esignature made by an individual on the document signifies knowledge, approval, acceptance, or obligation.

What are the benefits of an electronic signature?

These are the significant benefits of using electronic signature:

1) Save Costs: Save time in doing paperwork, printing, scanning, mailing, delivering, and storing the document
2) Save Time: Saves you from age-old rituals of paperwork. Going digital saves a lot of time, allowing you to focus on other essential tasks.
3) Legal Compliance: Electronic signatures are legally binded and acceptable all over the world.
4) Mobility: A significant advantage of eSignatures is helping businesses function irrespective of location & time.

How can I eSign documents for free?

Follow these simple steps to eSign a document for free:

Step 1: Click LunarPen to open a free account
Step 2: Create or upload a document using templates, Google Drive & Dropbox
Step 3: Use the signed document sharing feature
Step 5: Send the document for signature
Step 6: Use the LunarPen interface to esign your documents for free
Step 7: Receive signed documents by email

Posted by Lunar Pen in eSignaure Law, 0 comments