Digital Signature Lawfulness for Shipping in United Kingdom

How to eSign a document: digital signature lawfulness for Shipping in United Kingdom

hello and welcome to the telegraph Studios I'm Aleister green and today we're discussing how electronic signature technology can help small and medium Enterprises and joining me is Jasper Frederickson who is the general manager and VP for Europe for good morning Alistair thank you for inviting me well it's great to have you here because I'm really intrigued what exactly is electronic signature technology eSignature is the ability to take any legally binding transaction and execute it on one of these on your mobile device on your tablet on your PC at home the reason why you want to do that is because you want to speed up transactions you want to save money you want to be compliant and you want to enhance the user experience that's eSignature well we hear a lot about different digital solutions for smes so a lot of them are free so why should we be actually paying for eSignature technology so in my experience there are three good reasons why you need to invest in eSignature one you want to save money two you want to portray yourself as a truly digital business that is important in today's a very competitive market and three you want to make sure that you have an airtight audit trail that will stand up to any scrutiny or audit that you may come under so those are the reasons why it's a very Sound Investment that that any business should consider okay so let's say I'm a key decision maker or an entrepreneur and I decide to invest in eSignature technology how can I measure its success what's my return on investment sure so first of all the first one is simple you pull out your spreadsheet and you measure how much money am I saving secondly you try to to look at what is the value and the benefit of being digital what is the value of speeding up my transaction and appearing as a modern business and thirdly of course is how much money am I spending on storage and retention and how often do I end up in a situation where I lose a contract so if I go back to the first point there really is you are going to save on your printing cost on your paper cost on your shipping cost you are going to drive productivity amongst your Administration your sales staff and and your directors of the company in the second category about being digital that's perhaps a bit harder to quantify but just think of of the the day and age we live in today where there's so hot competition everything is speeding up it's a question of getting uh getting any agreement concluded very quickly whether you're hiring a great new candidate for your company whether you're selling something and and that's where the value lies in being truly digital it has a value in terms of speed it has a value in terms of of image and and branding value and then finally of course is what is the cost of not being able to find that magic document that you now need to produce it's almost like buying an insurance you need to make sure you have it so that's why eSignature should be high on any agenda for for any organization really to uh to save cost and drive a much more efficient business well it certainly sounds really really good and if it is as good and it helps as much with smes in their business then I can imagine it's a fairly fiercely competitive market so what does docusate design do what Solutions do you provide that the others don't so we've been doing this for 12 years so we build so we are the global market leader in eSignature and the reason why customers come to us are many but one we basically offer you functionality out of the box that will allow you to get it going literally in a matter of hours not just with Standalone but integrated with your technology from Microsoft from Salesforce from sap from Google and many of the other leading vendors the second reason is that we're investing an awful lot of money to make sure that our platform is secure it's highly available and that any transaction you do on it will stand up in a court of law and then lastly we're building out a great organization that is there to help you you're buying a service from and we are never more than a phone call away let's say I'm a director of a new company I'm just setting it up so I'm very much at the initial stages of it so I've got so much paperwork involved I'm buying assets I'm developing in the company I'm building employee database so I'm doing HR facilities I'm doing a lot of different things within that and eventually getting customers I might not be too familiar with or the legalities of it and how it works perhaps you could talk me through the process of actually involving in my new business sure well first of all you said about an account with and that allows you to initiate transactions and think of the examples you just gave well first of all you're going to hire staff that means you're going to send them an offer letter you're going to sell send them your health and safety policy there will be a stack of papers that needs to be signed you'll be signing up suppliers you probably want them to sign your non-disclosure agreement you want to sign a master legal agreement that regulates how you're going to trade and then most importantly you're going to start to to gain customers so if you want to put a sales contract in front of your prospective customers you need them to sign it and you need to start delivering your goods and services okay so can you show me how it actually works sure so what I've done I I have my iPad here what happened this morning was that I'm going into a meeting and they sent me a non-disclosure agreement I basically have to accept the terms so what I'm in my iPad here I look at my email they're saying dear Jasper we look forward to working with you prior to the meeting please print sign scan and return this or even better send it by fax and that's not a good idea so what I do in here is quite simple I basically open up my app here we go my non-disclosure agreement is now sent to it'll allow me to say sign here it's preparing the document and then in a moment what will happen is if it's the first time I'm signing I will actually sign on my iPad if I've signed before it will pick up my identity and simply just apply my legally binding signature so here we go we're seeing our agreement being rendered here and what I do now is I can apply my signature my initials my name Etc so I will go in and apply my signature a signing box will come up and I sign my name here and I say finish and that's basically it that is the art of uh of concluding a legally binding transaction on wow I mean it does look pretty impressive but you mentioned legally binding first of all how can I be assured that it is a legally binding but also it's secure and confidential let me show start with the last part of the question because those are two great questions we get that in every single customer engagement first of all the eSignature act in the UK has made this legally binding since the year 2000 and actually warrant against that so if you ever have a dispute and anyone uh sort of question their legality of this our legal team will stand behind you and uh and fight that battle the second part of your question is secure and available so the way we operate our infrastructure it's a long technical conversation but at any given point of time your document will live in three different data centers so we're highly available we basically apply the same level of security and scrutiny that a large bank would do in protecting your your money on on their accounts so yes we make this perfectly legally binding highly available and we offer Bank bank rate security to protect these digital assets well it certainly seems to be the way forward but what are doing to Future proof this way of doing business yeah so so what we're doing is we've been doing this as I said for a long time for 12 years that's when we invented the concept really and what we're doing now is we're basically taking it from what I would call Basic eSignature and we are expanding what we do into what we call digital transaction management so automating the whole workflow from originating an agreement applying the workflow and approvals signing and authenticating and then handing off to whatever your records management system is so that's one big thing and secondly we're taking this Global we want to make sure that the brand is trusted and legally binding all over the world so our simple ambition is to do to paper what visa did to money we want to make you able to transact all over the world on the digital uh platform provided by without any legal worries at all that's our ambition wow fascinating times ahead Jasper Frederickson thank you very much thank you thank you