The Power of Digital Signature Legality for Business Agreements in Canada

How to eSign a document: digital signature legality for Business agreements in Canada

well hello everyone thank you for joining today's webinar signing and concluding business contracts electronically before I hand the mic over to Chan Yerneni our moderator for today's session I do have a few housekeeping details to cover firstly this webinar will be recorded and shared after today's presentation next we would love to hear from you during the session all participants have been placed in listen-only mode so if you do have a question for our speaker please feel free to send it through chat feature we'll be answering questions at the end of the session if we don't get to your question during today's webinar we will be sure to follow up via email afterwards so without further ado I would like to take things over by welcoming our moderator Chan Yerneni Chan over to you to introduce our speakers Thank You Jenny really excited to be here today as Jenny mentioned my name is Chan and I'm the product manager for enterprise workflow solutions here at Ricoh Canada I would like to introduce you to our presenters today Franz Gangl and Kevin Morton Franz is the director of our digital transformation consulting team he's considered country's leading expert for all things related to document centric digital transformation we have Kevin Morton on the call Kevin is our manager for professional services and has over two decades of experience selling and implementing digital transformation solutions at some of the country's largest brands ranging from retail government to higher education welcome on our guys we have a lot of great content coming up so let's take a quick look at the agenda here so first we'll talk about the importance of electronic signatures then we will explore different kinds of signatures commonly used in the workplace today then we'll talk about the legality of electronic signatures in Canada will compare legacy versus electronic signature process look at some common use cases and finally get some recommendations on next steps from the experts on the call with that being said I will hand it off to Franz and Franz so thank you thank you to the attendees on the call for jumping right into the polling question what is your organization's most pressing need right now cash flow work from home or business continuity and Chan believe we'll give it another 30 seconds or so before we before we share the poll results okay and we'll bring this to a close and just take a look at our results so leading is work from home absolutely many of us are likely working from a home office right now at 43% second is business continuity concerned about how we're going to maintain our business flow during these times and third is cash flow at just under 18 percent thank you for everyone for sharing your thoughts during that poll and we'll have a couple more polls like this before the end of our session today these are certainly unprecedented times and as we're hunkering down following the government guidance for social distancing or are responding to the need for organizations or the need for people to deliver on our essential services all of us are taking a closer look at what is important for our businesses eSignatures can help with cash flow work from home and business continuity from a cash flow perspective eSignatures can allow business to be transacted and for revenue to be recognized even without the use of paper from a work-from-home perspective users can sign and approve documents and contracts without the need for printers scanners ink or paper only an internet connection is required email and a web browser to fulfill electronic signature transaction now from our business continuity perspective agreements can continue to be processed signed agreements can be stored and done so securely online and accessible from anywhere so what are eSignatures for those of us that transact business cross-border the U.S. e-sign act refers to electronic signatures as an electronic sound a symbol process attached to or logically associated with a contract or other record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record and be legally bound I think when people first encounter that interpretation from the U.S. e-sign act they're surprised that an electronic signature can be more than simply putting a digital version of my signature on an electronic document that it concluded a sound or a symbol or a process indeed these are all methods that can be used to demonstrate intent and provide signature closer to home the personal information and electronic documents Act Part 2 PIPEDA states that a signature that consists of one or more letters characters numbers or other symbols in digital form and put in or attached to or associated with an electronic document so this one speaks more familiarly to how we might interpret an electronic signature characters numbers or other symbols in digital form when we think about signatures let's it's helpful to take a look at the differences between a wet signature a digital signature and an electronic signature a wet signature we're all familiar with it's a permanent mark that's linked to a stable document usually paper that is associated with a specific personal individual and is proof of implicit or explicit intent it generally requires the presence certainly the presence of the user to apply the wet mark onto paper there are issues with liability in terms of the nature of the signature and how it was applied through our challenges with authenticity and forgery who actually applied that signature and there are cases of challenges with intent with regards to the signature but certainly a signed document we understand that the signer had the intent to sign and therefore agreed to the agreement a digital signature is one that is posted by digital media and there are various methods of digital signatures can be provided and therefore have variable reliability a common trend right now is we're all trying to figure out how to sign documents is to simply scan our signature and apply it as an image to our electronic document letter a PDF Word or Excel unfortunately that lacks many of the benefits of integration enterprise security and workflow and is really somewhere between wet signature and digital signature in terms of validity however it absolutely demonstrates intent and needs to be treated as such an electronic signature is one whose attributes have been strengthened thanks to cryptography with a purpose of increasing the reliability of the document with an electronic signature the process of achieving agreement can be tracked there is security around the signature of the documents God considers signed electronically can cannot be changed once they've been signed and therefore electronic signatures can be demonstrated to be legally binding it's one thing to apply signature to a document using a digital signature but really when you think about electronic signatures it's an agreement management process some of the expectations that we have from a strong eSignature solution should include the ability to create flexible agreement management workflows the ability to preserve the audit trail ideally a method that allows a flexible delivery model such as software as-a-service the end-user experience should be easy and easy to adopt and learn with little to no training ideally the solution should allow custom branding so that our businesses can be represented well inside that signature process single sign-on should limit the amount of authentication required particularly by our internal users that are creating the documents to be signed there should be variable certificate management processes and the solutions that integrate with off-the-shelf business applications like Salesforce or integrate with in-house or custom-built applications via api's and finally the document data integration and validation process should be well understood throughout the process what are some of the use cases where electronic signatures might be applied and I think we can think about electronic signatures in three types of agreement management processes business to business business to consumer and business to employee when we think about business the business we're thinking about things like non-disclosure agreements procurement documents sales agreements service contracts things like that all examples of agreements that can can maintain our business to business relationship when dealing with consumers things like new account opening documents loan application and sales and service terms and of course our business to employee contracts include contracts benefits paperwork employee onboarding processes so as we go through the balance of our presentation we're going to talk a little bit more about legality we're also going to spend a little bit more talking about the specific use cases that you might apply think about where your needs lie business to business b2c business to employee or perhaps all of the above Chan I'll turn it to you for our next poll question thank you Franz audience like you have done for our first question please record your responses on the screen and we will take a quick minute here to go through the poll data after you've got a chance to record your response so in our poll question which is your most urgent use case for eSignature well 37.5 responded with all of the above 35% are really keen on business-to-business twenty at business to consumer and business to employee at six point three percent thank you everyone for responding to the poll and we will continue with the rest of our presentation what is driving your competitors to adopt electronic signatures right now of course the current epidemic the current pandemic is creating an urgent need as we've identified for people to enable business processes while they work from home but prior to this and hopefully once we're through this eSignatures continue to be a significant market mover the market is expected to reach three point four four billion by 2022 - it's completely changing industries by re mastering core products and services there is now strong end-user in line of business demand for electronic signatures there is now increased availability mature ability maturity and scalability of these signature project products and and eSignatures have really reached mainstream adoption many of us can now think of situations where we have approved an agreement or assignment agreement using electronic signatures and there is now consistency in developing legal frameworks for electronic signature adoption across jurisdiction in Canada signature electronic signatures are legal at the federal level since 2004 electronic signatures are officially endorsed by the by PIPEDA as unique and distinctive created under the signers sole control can conform to the identity of the signer and are protected by technology that can identify changes in the document and across Canada at the provincial level since 1999 electronic signatures are accepted by law under the uniform electronic commerce act and they need to underscore the urgency for electronic signatures the Canada Revenue Agency as recently as this March identified that they will accept electronic signatures as having met the signature requirements of the income-tax act while they indicated the temporary measure to reduce the necessity for taxpayers and tax preparers to meet in person and will reduce the administrative burden during this difficult time well if it's going to reduce the administrative burden during this difficult time it will continue to reduce the burden when times are better and we expect that the CRA will continue this approach as we look forward when you think about a signature process we're likely signing ink on paper we think about this in four steps prepare sign act and manage in the prepare step we're creating our agreements that could be a Word document or a PDF file perhaps an Excel document that has terms and conditions and places to sign we might review and collaborate with our teams to get the right verbage or get the right numbers and details into the agreement and then we invariably print the document we print of course so we can capture a signature of a pen on paper and once it's signed we might then communicate it to the intended recipient whether that's by mail or might scan it or fax it or you might scan it and email it so we take that image of that signed document and then act upon it when I receive that signed contract and update our records indicating that agreement has been made and that may trigger additional processes or start a billing process and finally that agreement needs to be managed we will store that document if on paper we'll store it in a filing cabinet or we might scan it and store it an electronic document management system so we can search for it and demonstrate some kind of audit ability when when we when we move forward or we have to represent or retrieve the document in an audit process electronic signatures can help streamline this process from end to end the Ricoh electronic signature solution has supported over a billion transactions over a million envelopes daily and over two million connect messages over 140,000 development accounts and 4,000 integrations it supports various api's demonstrates significant increases in turnaround time has Canadian data centers and carrier grade availability supporting standards like ISO 27001 SSAE 16 and SOC 1 and supports in GDPR legislation so we think about a solution using electronic signatures then our process might look something like this rather than manually preparing documents we can create form from pre-approved templates that we can auto populate with data from other systems or manually enter data we can prepare documents and collaborate and comment with multiple parties online and automate the review and approval process by initiating cups of workloads we can prepare with a very high level of automation but of course we can still receive manually if that's right right now from a signing perspective signing can be done quickly and securely by routing that contract and multiple parties so they can sign in either parallel or prescribed sequential order we can identify each signer appropriate to the jurisdiction and monitor the status of each participant in their signing process so that you know in advance of who's signed and who hasn't that you know where the document is in the signing process and you can certify the signing process and the completed agreement to act the receipt of that signed completive agreement can trigger internal processes dynamically after agreement execution it can automatically transfer payment amounts to a billing system or collect payments as part of the signing process and finally the electronic signature process can manage the flexible options to securely retain agreements in a centralized cloud storage location or provide centralized access across different repositories such as your laser fuse your SharePoint we can easily retrieve agreements based on specific search criteria and we can report on agreement completion turnaround times and other trends to support continuous improvement there's a fast ecosystem out-of-the-box connectors to line a business software such as integrations with CRM s like Salesforce dynamics and sugar productivity solutions like office and google erp solutions like SAP and Laserfiche and cloud solutions like Google Drive box and Dropbox so you can get up and running quickly with more than 300 connectors you can digitize the approval process with your existing industry specific applications that supports streamlined workloads to get more out of your existing investments and that is easy to deploy earlier we talked about typical use cases around as to business business to consumer and business to employee now here's a breakdown of departmental business cases across the business get sales orders such as referral reseller or field sales agreements and new customer signups in the HR department we're looking at contractor agreements on-boarding and off-boarding check lists employee policy distribution the payroll forms new hire paperwork think about finance invoice processing expense reporting policy management inventory sign-off from an IT operations tracking assets and change request an order fulfillment and legal non-disclosure agreements contract management internal compliance and finance agreements to name a few there are applications across marketing facilities support and product management and procurement such as customer approvals work orders account changes cancellation requests change your release management purchase order statements of work our feed signup and so many more so with that in mind let's take another moment to break out for a quick poll on what departments within your organization will you be using eSignatures for Chan thank you Franz the poll is live and audience please record your response on your screens we will close the poll in a few seconds here are the results over to you Franz thank you Chan the almost half of the respondents indicated that sales was a key area for them not surprising given our need for managing business continuity off the top and work from home in our initial poll Chan followed by 20% in finance and other and HR being at 13% and IT operations at 8% other at just under 11% so significant need to use electronic signatures to optimize sales first and absolutely make a lot of sense at this point we'd like to share a success story and to share the successor I'd like to hand over the presentation to Kevin Morton take it away Kevin thanks Franz we just want to cover off real quick on a success story I think is relevant to the time we had a major credit union in the interior of BC that was looking at automating some processes they focused really on four major areas one was mortgage renewals stop payment stop automatic payments and funds funds transfer I really just want to focus in on the mortgage renewal process just so that everybody can understand the end and fronts covered that agreement path this is a true example of leveraging that agreement path and in today's time this gives the credit union the ability to continue to function as normal so the mortgage process would start with someone would go to their website they would access a request for mortgage renewal that mortgage renewal would going to a mortgage agent within the credit union that credit union mortgage advisor would make the necessary change meant to the changes to the agreement prepare the paperwork and then they would send it back to the client the client would review it and approve it through electronic signature and submit back to the credit union and then they would be able to release the fund and renew that mortgage as per normal this is all electronic they did not have to leave their house they did not have to go into the branch and this allowed them to adopt to a newer mindset of being able to be virtual to their clients their customers one of the the main focuses of this was to improve the client experience however they also saw a 76 percent reduction in cycle time for processing applications so this is an end-to-end story of creation through to approval through execution just like Franz had covered off I want to just kind of identify where you go from here we've covered a lot of information and and you're going to have to go back and understand where do we start so some of the keys are to identify use cases that impact cash flow right away at this point in time with the current situation getting cash moving through the organization is key to sustainability of any business you also want to examine specific use cases for business value having the ability to transact electronically allows customers to interact better with you as a as a vendor as well as provide services quickly you want to look for a product that you can expand and grow over time this is about the high touch can I if I implement a application process that I use once a month is that the key area to focus in on implement you want to solve immediate business requirements in today's time you need to get back to business you need to be able to function and be able to process orders and agreements so that's the priority today get buying get support and then it will expand within your organization focus on must-haves versus nice to have you know if if cost becomes an issue it does not make sense to start with the most complex convoluted process that's not going to give you a return on your investment right away and really the crux of this is if you're not looking at eSignatures your your competitors are it allows you to get back to business today and our recommendation would be to adopt them as quickly as possible when you think about Ricoh and just to understand a little bit of a who Ricoh is we provide services to one point two nine million custom companies worldwide we have been looking at evolving the workplace for many years we have various various segments of our business that can support organizations and we just wanted to give it a little bit of background about what Ricoh has to offer just to give you a better sense so our portfolio of services include document processing services this is about large AP outsourcing if you have accounts payable process and getting invoices processed in a timely manner we have services that can provide that support communication services in this time that we're in where a lot of people are virtual or remote we have a whole host of solutions that can enable remote work and collaboration content and workflow services we will talk a little bit more about content and workflow services on Thursday Chan will cover off that about that webinar but essentially this is giving you access to your documents where you need access remotely on prem whatever it's say a today solution and a day forward solution on site managed services we can provide resources on site when we get back to normalcy we can get people on site to support you where you need we have an entire IT services organization which can provide consulting cloud services infrastructure support and then we have our specialized ediscovery services which is really in the legal space but this is about understanding legal documents doing legal review and file analysis and ensuring that your data is protected and then the last thing I'd like to share there is this link will be shared with everybody on the call there is an electronic signature 30-day free trial that gives you an opportunity to understand how it works where you can leverage it and it really gives you a sense of how you can better use it in your organization at this point I will turn it back to Chan to talk about some additional webinars that are coming up thank you Kevin and Franz that was really good content that you presented so for the audience before we go into questions I want to mention that we concluded our first webinar in our new world of work webinar series there's more to come please take a look at the rest of them on your screen I want to particularly point out to the webinar that's happening on Thursday the 16th and on secure access to visit business critical information in that webinar we will talk about document-centric workflows business process automation and that webinar will be a natural extension to the just-concluded eSignature webinar so make sure you join that webinar as well with that being said I would now like to move into the questions part Franzen Kevin we do have some questions from the audience and I'll be I we have about five questions and and we will be talking about those now so I believe this first question is for Franz the question Franz is how do I know which contract or agreement process to focus on for our first electronic signature project thanks Chan good question I think that the requirements will be based on the type of organization and the specific organization requirements but generally I would say that organizations are thinking about how to maintain cash flow and revenue while servicing their existing clients right now and so things that are related to sales agreements customer onboarding service onboarding service work are taking higher priority now and then the specific types of documents will vary by by vertical market based on that list very good thank you next one is to Kevin so can the audience has asked if our key signature solution integrates with their internal Salesforce instance absolutely yes Ricoh actually use it with our salesforce instance ultimately there are I believe four thousand plus integrations out of the box for our solution common platforms like Microsoft Dropbox Google Laserfiche they're all have integrations with the signature solution also mobile capabilities on your iOS Android and Windows devices in addition we have developers that can work with the API to do custom integrations where needed and so absolutely very good Oh Kevin I believe this is for you as well what documents are supported for electronic signatures pretty much I would like to say every document type but again it's really relative to the specifics but your standard document formats the way the application works you actually tag where you want to put where you require the signature to actually highlight the area where you need a signature or approval or initial but it's all your standard formats your you know your Word documents your PDFs your Excel files they are all capable as well as image files okay thank you and another question here Kevin this is also for you what is the average cost deploy an electronic signature solution in my HR department it's really dependent on on the number of transactions I can tell you from an entry-level perspective the way the solution is is priced is based on on transactions and there's a minimum requirement so to say that an entry-level organization doing the minimum of 500 transactions that solutions are going to be sub $5,000 that's not not Signet you know $1,000 but it will be in the in the 3 to 5000 depending on what what features and solutions need again it it's what do you need today and then you grow it from there because there are a lot of feature sets that you can add to the solution but that's that kind of gives you a rough estimate and I think we've more than happy to share the detail once we have a little bit of engagement from a consulting team to better understand the use cases and where you're going to leverage excellent this is for both a few I guess so this is a two-part question the first part of this is this particular customer has an internal process based on dollar value it requires multiple levels of signature for approval of pio requests etc so can our platform handle that that's the first part of the question sure I will I'll take that Kevin so the the workflow of the tool allows you to do multiple variations of signing so you can set up a default agreement and if an agreement value goes of a certain level it requires the next level of approval we can also do you know Waterfall means it goes from one signer to the next to the next to the next you can also go as far as having it based on anybody can sign in any order so there are multiple different avenues for approval you even have the feature of if you need a notary so somebody a witness beside you we even have the capability to do that as well so the approval process can be built depending on how your organization needs it and understand that it's it's treated as one transaction for multiple approvals awesome Kevin I would just add to that is they can do sequential signatures they can also do parallel signatures right yep yes absolutely okay very good now the second part of this question is how much does it cost to how to process like that setup so the the cost would still be based off of the same example I give you in the previous question of it's really relative to the number of transaction the way the tool is designed is there is we call it adoption consulting which is basically overview of how to use the workflow tool we can leverage yeah well the intent would be is you would have a power user within your organization that could build those workflows however we have additional resources that can work with you as it on a consulting basis you know type of materials to help determine those workflows but the tool is designed that a power users should be able to create those standard workflows and processes I'll give you an example our legal counsel with with variable contracts he tags and signs his own documents with the solution okay all right next question this audience member wants to know why they should be purchasing this purchasing Ricoh electronic signature solution versus a product like Adobe from from from that vendor so pronti I think that absolutely so yeah so I would say that there are quite a few good products in the market Adobe is certainly certainly one of them by a well-known vendor I think that generally a usability and experience to do basic key signature workflows and processes would be comparable but I would give Ricoh's solution the edge in terms of its ability to integrate with many many different applications both out of the box and with AP is and then the overall end to end process in terms of parallel and sequential approvals while both have it I think Ricoh's implementation seems to be a bit more streamlined based on user feedback thank you Franz and just to add to that we also provide a range of digital transformation services with the electronic signature could be a part of a much larger project and we can provide all those services like what Kevin has mentioned earlier right so that's another value we bring to the table okay next question is our platform be built based on monthly transaction or annual I'll take that so it's an annual subscription that is based off of the number of transaction and it's expandable so the the best way to describe it is we would do some analysis with our team to understand the average number of transactions that are going to happen in any given and that gives us a basis to determine the pooled number of transactions that we need and then it's an annual subscription that we then monitored report on as we go through the year we'll advise where you're at in your your subscription and usage and if you need more usage we'll expand it if you need less usage if you're not at the minimum we can lower it as well but we will manage that okay I think we have time for one more question and this one is so for all intense questioning nature or rather here electronic signature very truth a stored because there is two truths here so they're asking where the information is stored so the transaction is stored within the electronic signature repository or cloud for lack of better expression that's you know we talked about Canadian residency but you can also download the transaction and there is options to use a third party blockchain as well so that transaction can be held in multiple multiple locations it's really dependent on what you require okay all right and the the requesters I would say the requesters question is one that would be would be a very very good question and as have some additional conversation that would need to be had to explore that in more detail of how we support those requirements in the electronic signature process thank you I think that's all the time we have for questions today well thank you everyone for joining today's webinar we really enjoyed this webinar and we look forward to seeing you in our next next webinar thank you