[VIDEO] How to Declare Independence from E-Signature Risk

 Think all e-signatures are the same? Think again! Electronic signatures may be easy to use, but most solutions don’t include the long-term legal evidence you need, leaving you at risk. John Harris, our SVP of product management, addressed this issue last week at BAI Payments Connect. Here's what he had to say:

Good afternoon, everybody. Excuse me, I’m just finishing signing this document I just read. They’re calling it a Declaration of Independence, and it appears to be very revolutionary. The amazing thing about a signature is that I can drop the quill, but the signature is still hard and fast on the page.

The fact that I can drop that quill highlights a really important part about a signature. We can lose that pen. Now wet ink signatures have a lot to answer for. We think about the money and time and resources we spend dealing with paper today, but the signature is the evidence. It’s transparent in process, clear on the page and based on a clear stamp—ink. 

But, declaring independence from paper isn’t as simple as saying “Hey, let’s go get some e-signatures,” and we’re good to go. Ease of use is critical, but you have to think about, "How long is this signature going to last?" You need to choose electronic signatures that are as verifiable as the wet ink signature but without that pen.

What I’m going to show you today is an Independent E-Signature^TM solution based in the cloud that we’ve built over the last 13 years to be easy to use for the signer. It creates an independent e-signed document that outlasts us as a vendor and creates a transparent evidence trail that proves without a shadow of a doubt that the signature took place.

E-Signature Independence in Action

I’m going to go over to the document camera. Today I’m playing the role of Donnie Human who’s been asked to sign a document and click link from an email and website. It knows me by name, Donnie Human. It’s going to walk me through all the appropriate steps to sign a document. I hit "Next." Now it’s going to ask me to type in a signing password. This is what we use to control access to the electronic signature and also your signed documents after you’re finished signing.

Then, I can actually choose how my signature is going to look on the page. And then I’m going to go ahead and hit “Go,” it jumps me right to where I need to sign on this document and I click “sign.” Now we can have it just as simple as you click, or we can actually ask the user to keep entering that signature password every time they sign.

What we’re trying to do is capture the signer’s intent to sign and make sure we’re capturing the tidbits of information along the way to capture that evidence. And that’s transparent to the user. Now all I have to do is hit “Finish” and I’m done. And simplicity is critical. Simple is so important. That’s how the millions of signatures we’ve delivered over the years have saved companies millions of dollars, increased revenue and decreased turnaround for various products.

Beyond Simplicity

But if you’re the company or the organization relying on these signatures, you need more. I don’t know any compliance or auditors that are happy with “simple” and “good enough.” And the signature is so important you need to be thinking about independence—independence from the vendor in particular.

So if we can go over to the number seven here, what we’re looking at is an NDA that Mary and Jane signed a couple of days ago in our system. And, you’ll I’m using the free Adobe Reader 11, and I can use Nitro or Foxit or PDF viewer. You’ll see signatures that you’d expect on a document. Up in the upper left hand corner you see the green checkmark that’s telling me the document is tamper evident, so that any changes I make to the document are actually visible in real time.

And if I hover over Mary’s signature, you’ll see it says, “valid signature.” Independent E-Signatures like SIGNiX’s are actually based on open published standards. So they’re automatically, natively understood by these viewers. What that also means is I can click on this signature and get more information. (And more. And more. And more.)

So the idea is that all this cryptographic information that we store in the document (that may glaze over some eyes), and a cryptographic expert from anywhere around the world can look at this and say, ”Oh that’s a RSA 24 digital signature, etc...” You’ll notice that nowhere in the string of acronyms is our company’s name. And that’s how it should be. When I sign with the pen, you don’t care if I sign with a Bic pen or a $500 Mont Blanc. The ink is the standard there, and cryptography is the standard here. Independence has its benefits.

Advanced Tamper Evidence

Now, a lot of e-signature vendors will tell you you only want tamper evident seal on the document, because why would you need more? We think independence takes a different course. When we tamper seal a document, we tamper seal every time you sign or initial. So if I right click on this signature, I can show you the version of the document that Jane signed. All of this the information, the snapshots of the document are all embedded in the document we provide you at the end of the transaction with no link back to our website. Why risk a link back to a website when in five years you have to prove this document in court? With us, there’s no dependency on a website and no dependency on SIGNiX.

With e-signatures, you need more that just the appearance of the signature on the page. You also need process. You need to understand how the signatures got on the page. And that’s where you need a transparent audit trail or evidence trail that shows you all the steps you took to get a signature on the page.

So what you’re looking at here is our very verbose audit trail. And every event, every email we send, every document that’s reviewed, even the cryptographic information of every signature we apply is in this evidence trail provided to you at the close of the transaction. Other e-signature vendors might say this is overkill, that you don’t need this information. They might say they have all that information on their servers, behind their black box. You can come back to them any time and get it. But that’s not transparent. They’re making you dependent on their system. Five, ten years from now are they going to be around?

So, in the immortal words of my friend, Thomas Jefferson, “Hold these truths to be self-evident.” Choose an independent e-signature solution that’s easy for the signer, that creates an independent, e-signed document that outlasts the e-signature vendor and creates a transparent audit trail that will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the signature took place. Declare independence from paper and choose independent e-signatures. Thank you.