There are several important SmartSign Web® product enhancements that should appeal to any business improvement process. Here I am only going to highlight a few. We’ll have more detailed information to come over the next few days. We’ve added a number of important workflow integration enhancements so that we can be more tightly embedded and work more seamlessly with customer downstream business processes, these include:
New Push Service –You can now configure eOriginal’s SmartSign to automatically push working copies of executed transactions into customer systems such as document management, ERP or CRM providing users with real-time signature updates especially helpful for underwriting, loan underwriting and multi-location sales teams.
New Document Format Options – You can choose to upload non-PDF documents and have it auto-converted to PDF format. Supported document types include Text Documents (i.e. Microsoft Word, Plain Text), Spreadsheet and Data Documents (i.e. Excel, Lotus Notes, Comma-Separated Variables), Presentation Documents such as Power Point and Image Documents (i.e. JPEG, PNG). This makes it easier to process directly from any desktop and add attachments such as a photo taken from a mobile device and uploaded without scanning.
Role based signing configuration – You can now configure document sets for individual roles, defining which documents are displayed or hidden from each participant in the transaction.
Streamlined Consent Process –Organizations can elect to incorporate ESIGN consent in the user’s login process to speed routine signing.
We’ve also made it even easier to configure and brand the signing experience so users can complete typical configurations without programming skills.
iPads and such: More organizations are incorporating mobile devices into their business processes; and contract signoffs and contract modifications are at the top of the list for taking critical advantage of anytime, anywhere capabilities. You can easily add these to a SmartSign-enabled implementation.
Need a good example of how eSigning with eOriginal can cut your customer’s revenue cycles? Direct Capital, a Northeast leasing company, decreased their average deal time from 5 days to an average of two hours and cut the error rate from 30% to less than 5%.
Our latest release of SmartSign Web offers enhanced support for organizations with advanced electronic signature process requirements. When transactions involve multiple documents and multiple participants, there is often a need to present different subsets of documents to each participant. Our new role-based sort orders allow you to do just that. As you configure your signing rules for each transaction, you describe all active documents for the transaction as the default sort order. When defining each role, you may now override the default sort order with a custom sort order, that applies only to that role.
Let’s consider the following scenario:
A charitable organization offers financial aide and assistance to qualifying families. To qualify, an income verification must be performed for both the husband and the wife. The husband completes his income statement and requests his employer to verify it, as does the wife for her employer. The husband and his employer should only see his income statement, the wife and her employer should only see her income statement, and the organization’s processor must see both documents to offer the final approval.
With role-based sort orders, this entire workflow can be defined at the time the transaction is initiated (or updated at any point thereafter), ensuring each participant has access to only their applicable document(s).
Please watch this brief video for an overview on how to configure role-based sort orders.
In today’s proliferation of cloud based computing and SaaS delivered applications, there is often a required missing element of automatically synchronizing data across multiple business applications. Companies often need to automatically synchronize their systems to help guide and update internal workflows based on actions controlled by an outside application. For example, when an non-disclosure agreement is signed your customer tracking application should be automatically updated to reflect that so your sales representative can schedule a demonstration.
Integration issues often arise when one application controls the primary flow that a customer is seeing, and a second application needs to be updated with information driven by the actions or results in the control system. In traditional web services, the second application must make constant calls to the control system to find out not only if anything changed, but what exactly changed and when.
This is a very inefficient and daunting task and leads to unnecessary strain on both applications. Let’s think about it in terms of a quarterback and a group of wide receivers on a football team. In traditional web services, our wide receivers all run around asking the quarterback if it is time for him to throw the ball. As we all know, this is not the best approach. It is the quarterback who is holding that ball and his responsibility to make his reads and know exactly when the ball must be thrown to the wide receiver that results in the game changing touchdown.
Now, with SmartSign Web’s new Push Service workflow automation tool, eOriginal can throw you that game winning pass. In our newest release of SmartSign Web, your organization can choose to have different actions in our Signing Room pass messages to your applications. These messages may be used to trigger updates within an internal dashboard, CRM system or to automatically load data into a customer service system. The use of our automated Push Service will help your organization control business workflow and improve data reporting within your existing applications. Push Service messages can be sent to as many applications as your organization needs, with as much or as little information as required (e.g. information about the signer, form data, watermarked working copies of signed documents, or a digitally signed copy of a document’s audit trail).
SmartSign Web’s Push Service could not be easier to integrate with! To use the Push Service, eOriginal provides a Web Service Description Language (WSDL) that allows your IT team to integrate the Push Service with your applications in no time at all. The WSDL aids in the automated generation of the code needed to receive, parse, and control the flow of the message’s information received from SmartSign Web – in the language of your choice.
As you can see integrating your existing applications with SmartSign Web has never been easier. For more detailed information about this new service, please contact the eOriginal Sales Department.
Need to get that contract executed today, but your VP is sitting in the airport heading to a conference?
The popularity of mobile devices like Apple’s iPad and iPhone make it easy to share contract documents anywhere, anytime so why not take it to the next step and use SmartSign Web to sign and close the deal?
The iPad holds the particular promise to accelerate the mass adoption of electronic signatures because it has the screen real estate to view the entire document. Imagine walking into your local bank to open an account and the bank employee hands you an iPad to affix your signature to the account application or the check signature card. Or when you are returning a vehicle off lease at the dealership, quickly go through the vehicle inspection and sign off right there with the iPad.
Contract modifications are another excellent opportunity to leverage mobile signing. Typically any change to an agreement or contract requires senior management approval and sign-off. These executives travel often, so why not allow them to access, review and execute documents in the airport, at the conference or in the hotel? With an iPad and SmartSign Web they can.
And going paperless isn’t just doing business faster at less cost, it can also have a big impact on your corporate image from both the environmental impact and heightened customer experience when they complete a transaction in a single process.
Best of all, SmartSign Web puts all this flexibility and power in your hands while protecting your business by ensuring compliance with the ESIGN electronic signature requirements. SmartSign Web’s secure and comprehensive audit trail maintains legal admissibility and enforceability of all your important business records. Now that is the best of both worlds.
The latest release of our premier electronic signature process management system, SmartSign Web, includes the ability to sign commonly used business documents created in popular Microsoft Office applications such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This new capability also enables users to add scanned images and IBM Lotus Notes documents into SmartSign for electronic signature capture. New documents uploaded into the system are quickly converted into Adobe PDF for review and signature capture.
This new feature allows users to create custom documents and quickly add them to a transaction for signature. The SmartSign template designer’s easy to use drag-and-drop interface can still be utilized to mark up the documents for data collection and signature capture. These custom documents are automatically integrated with standard forms already managed by SmartSign and eCore, allowing more flexibility for complex business transactions that often require unique documents based on business rules.
This capability is not limited to the creation and send process, downstream participants of a transaction can also upload documents such as attachments in any of the new supported formats. These documents will also be dynamically converted to PDF and added to the transaction. For example, if a user must upload a scanned image of his drivers license. The scanned TIFF or GIF image can be uploaded directly into SmartSign. The user does not have to learn how to convert the scanned documents into PDF or perform any post-scanning process on the image.
Benefits
Leverage existing investment in familiar document creation tools
Quickly send out custom documents for signature
Increase employee productivity by eliminating document conversion and processing tasks
Speed time to close business transactions with streamlined business processes that eliminate paper distribution and handling
Improve security with tamper-evident seals on documents and the detailed audit trail
This is only one of the hundreds of new capabilities featured in the latest release of SmartSign and eCore. Check back here over the next few days as we share more of the features available; such as advanced configuration options, workflow automation tools, tighter integration with internal applications, and more!
It’s hard to believe that 10 years have already passed since President Clinton symbolically eSigned the E-SIGN Act. In that time the electronic signature industry has certainly grown and progressed a long way. The software and processes have greatly improved, mobile devices have evolved and changed the way business is done, and everyday more businesses are realizing the benefits of online automated processes. Without the E-SIGN Act who knows what direction the industry and e-commerce as a whole would have gone.
The E-SIGN Act not only made electronic signatures legal, it instilled confidence in businesses, and more importantly their general council, to leverage new and emerging technologies to help their businesses grow. In 2000 businesses were still struggling with the idea of how to handle online business transactions, e-commerce was still a somewhat new idea without much supportive legislation.
Over the past decade it’s become hard to imagine not having the ability to jump online to complete a transaction, purchase insurance, sign leasing agreements, etc. without the confidence that your documents will be correctly signed, secured, and managed. eOriginal is not only a proud pioneer of these technologies but we continue to forge ahead by enabling businesses to utilize other technologies such as multimedia signatures with voice authentication, bio-metric data, and hand-written signatures captured on pads to complete their online transactions. The value of electronic signatures and the E-SIGN Act and is proven by the success of our clients who have adopted our technologies to improve their processes such as:
A major leasing company that in several months shortened their customer acquisition from 5 days to 10 minutes.
One of the largest auto financers surpassed their target of 44% adoption and reached an 80% adoption rate within the first 12 months and can now complete a transaction in as little as 20 minutes.
An insurance provider that uses our patent-pending voice signature technology to not only complete a contract but also initiate payment in a single transaction.
Several of our clients have securitized more than $5 billion in econtracts using our systems for the secondary market
As impressive as these achievements have been in the last 10 years, the next decade has even more promise as business drive down costs, become greener, speed their processes and incorporate additional technology such as the latest generation Smart Phones and the iPad™ to create a better customer experience. So big thanks to the E-SIGN Act for kick-starting our industry.
Many of us have been following and anxiously awaiting a decision by the Utah Supreme Court regarding the challenge of the legal validity of electronic signature for government ballots which relied heavily on Utah’s version of the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA). I have read many differing and varying opinions from legal experts, blogs, tweeters, etc. but we can all stop speculating because the ruling on June 22, 2010 confirmed the validity of the collected eSignatures established new precedent.
What this decision does, is open the door for wider implementation of electronic signatures by government and businesses that have been slower to adopt this type of technology because of legal concerns. As stated by David K. Isom yesterday in a great blog post, Electronic Signatures Come of Age: From Elections to Commerce and Beyond, “The Utah decision resolved many of the fundamental issues presented by UETA, and resolved them in a way that energizes UETA. UETA will have a broader application in states that follow Anderson than most commentators would have predicted.”
I’m sure we’ll be seeing the positive effects of this decision. With the recent decision by the FHA to accept eSignatures on 3rd party documents and a preliminary decision by the North Carolina State Bar for the use of SaaS products as long as reasonable care” is taken to minimize risks to the “confidentiality and to the security of client information and client files, it appears that technology and products like eOriginal’s eSigantures solutions will be playing a greater role and making a wider impact on the way in which government and businesses handle their online transactions.
In working with insurance companies that are taking their business processes on line for better origination and servicing, nothing is more important than nailing the application process down in such a way that anyone who wants to buy insurance can get started and complete their application as quickly and seamlessly as possible. The best way to make that happen is a single online session that starts the process in real-time and doesn’t bog down for printing, mailing followed by receiving, manual workflow processing, scanning and callbacks for errors or missing data.
Of course there are other benefits to taking application process and completing it online. An applicant, online the carrier or selling agent has also done their part in going Green by eliminating the need to print, fax, ship, and store paper. Not only helping the environment but saving money by reducing storage and operating costs incurred through paper based systems. However an equally important, and often hidden, issue for the carrier and agents are all of the potential applicants who opted out of a paper driven process because it was too cumbersome, slow, or those that intended to complete the paper form but never got around to it. These potential customers either never generate revenue or will generate revenue for a company whose online processes are more customer friendly.
So how can eOriginal’s SmartSign Web help insurance providers to streamline their processes?
Enable customers to electronically sign the application with an online web application
Manage all workflow, routing, and vaulting procedures of the application process through SmartSign Web’s customization options.
Reduce your organizations dependency on paper, saving you time and money.
Reduce errors and incomplete documents greatly reducing any NIGO applications.
HIPAA and ACORD compliant security and data management
Bind voice signatures to applications for faster processing and payment authorization.
Increase revenue by allowing your customers to quickly review, eSign, and receive a copy of their policy and additional forms.
To learn more about how we may be able to streamline your processes please contact me directly at 410-625-5147 or just us a question in the comments and I’ll be sure to promptly respond.
A few days ago I came across an interesting post on Elliot’s Blog about the simplicity and usefulness of electronic signatures reducing the need to print, sign, and ship contracts and other documents, but what was really great about the post, was the conversation it prompted through the comments that were posted.
As an active participant in this conversation dealing with questions and concerns about the validity of eSignatures, I wanted to highlight and address a few of the common concerns that were brought up.
Legal Enforceability and Admissibility and Doc Security: Depending on your individual business needs, a pure signing tool may be all you need. However, if your business needs to protect your digital documents, a more robust solution is necessary. We provide advanced ID verification tools to ensure the correct person(s) are signing along with a detailed audit trail, we encrypt and digitally tamper seal each document and file associated with your transactions, and we also provide transaction management services that allow organizations to meet all compliance, regulatory, and workflow requirements that limit your company’s legal exposure and protect the value of your documents.
Customization: eOriginal’s solutions were designed to be flexible, allowing us to conform to your business needs. That is why we offer multiple integration and deployment methods and an extensive library of web-service calls/APIs. We take into consideration business workflow processes, transaction management needs, and budget to find the best solution to fit each individual business needs.
Costs: Many customers, especially Small Business owners, believe that the products and technology needed to provide the security and workflow options to fit their business needs are too expensive, when in turn, many providers including eOriginal have electronic signature packages designed not only for large enterprise clients but also for small businesses.
If you have any additional questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly at 410-625-5149 or just post your questions on our comments section and I’ll be sure to provide answers to your questions.
eOriginal has seen a significant increase in the number of small businesses wanting to learn more about how our eSignature software can help their businesses grow by shortening sales cycles, eliminating paper, and reducing the amount of resources needed to manage their contract process before and after they’ve been executed.
So to limit the amount of resources needed to get small businesses implemented with eSignatures and secure, compliant records management we’ve created new eSignature packages specifically for those businesses that need/want the same level of security, legal compliance, and flexibility for their eSigned documents as large corporations demand.
A few benefits for small businesses include:
Get up and running having your agreements eSigned within 24-48 hours
Improved Signer verification with email and one-time user verification code.
Mobile signing for mobile use on Window Mobile IE and iPhone Safari.
Workflow Management Routing, automated notifications, automated status transitions, expirations.
eSignature Processing digitally signature binding and document tamper-seal for proof of non-repudiation
Enterprise Datacenter with SAS-70 Type II, PCI-compliant datacenter, fully redundant, 24/7 security and operations.
In the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting a few of our clients and growing small businesses that are using our electronic signature tools.
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