How to Use E-Signatures to Achieve Digital Transformation

Digitalization has changed everything, especially the way businesses used to work. When talking about signatures, e-signatures have taken the place of traditional signing ways (wet signatures). E-signatures have made the document signing process much easier and smoother for businesses, customers, as well as clients. Let’s know more about e-signatures, what exactly they are and why companies must start using them as their business tool. 

What is an E-Signature?

E-signatures are a safe and secure way of signing any documents. As compared to traditional means of acquiring an important signature, e-signatures are much faster and secure ways of signing a document. The traditional ways of acquiring signatures via email, fax, and mail were very time-consuming and expensive as well. Besides, it required a huge amount of papers to be printed, copied, distributed, signed, and stored for safekeeping. Due to the traditional way of signing documents, many businesses were facing delays in processing various important tasks. However, with digitalization and the introduction of e-signatures, businesses are able to perform various tasks quickly and efficiently without the need to wait for long for documents to get signed for approval of a process from the concerned party.

For administrative tasks, e-signatures provide quick turnarounds, thereby, helps to save a lot of time for processes that truly matter in a business. E-signatures have emerged as a crucial part of many organizations today due to their ability to:

• Authenticate documents 
• Maintain security
• Boost efficiency, and 
• Reduce costs

With the help of genuine electronic signature software, one can easily send and receive documents anywhere in the world for signing purposes. The recipient can easily sign documents, accept the terms in no time and send them back to the concerned person using a computer or smartphone. 

Reasons Why Businesses Should Adopt E-Signatures

Businesses that are still using traditional methods of signing documents must adopt the e-signature concept as this efficient business tool for organizations contains several benefits, such as:

● High Speed: Collecting a signature can sometimes be a very long process, especially when the person who needs to sign the document is not present at the same place where the document is. In such a case, e-signatures act as a fast and effective solution. One can send the document quickly online and the recipient can immediately review and sign the document using an electronic signing app. 

● Environmental Friendly Solution: In today’s time, more and more companies are adopting environmentally-friendly practices to save and preserve natural resources as well as to keep the environment neat and clean. E-signatures is one such eco-friendly business practice that also allows businesses to save huge on various costs like paper, printing, scanning, delivery, storage, and many others. 

● Better Efficiency: As electronic signatures can be captured quickly and easily with just the click of a button without spending huge amounts of money, it helps organizations in improving their efficiency and productivity. 

● Highly Secure Solution: As compared to traditional ways of signing documents, e-signatures are far more safe and secure. The digital encryption affiliated with the e-signatures assures the complete security of signed documents. The users can be assured that the e-signatures are properly sealed, stored, and protected against hackers, a breach in security, and various other threats. Moreover, with e-signatures automatic records are maintained that comprise all the details like what changes were made after the document was sealed, who made the changes, time, etc. This helps to prevent the chances of documents being tampered with or mishandled. 

● Legally Valid: Some people get confused about the validity of e-signatures. It is important to note that e-signatures hold the same legal validity as wet signatures have. In fact, in earlier traditional document signing methods, legal investigations were completely based on the words of witness and handwriting identifications. However, in the case of e-signatures legal investigations can be performed correctly with the help of various factors that are recorded automatically with digital signatures like the time, date, IP address, and unique user identification key. 

● Easy to Store: With a paper signature, there comes the need for a lot of storage for the safekeeping of documents. However, with electronic signatures, all the documents are stored automatically in an organized and secure manner on cloud storage, thus are protected against security threats, fire, flood, and other damages. 

● Cost-Effective: E-signatures are one of the cost-effective ways that companies can use to reduce their expenses of buying papers, tools, and resources. 

Conclusion: 

All the above-mentioned reasons are enough for businesses to make a shift from traditional ways of signing the documents to the latest, fast and secure way, which is an electronic signature method. While making the entire process of signing any documents smooth and fast, e-signatures assures that everything is safe and secure.