Unlock Electronic Signature Legitimacy for Your Startup Business Plan

How to eSign a document: electronic signature legitimacy for Startup Business Plan

Well good morning and a very warm welcome to the  StepOver webinar series in winter and spring 2022.   My name is Joachim Fischer and together with  my colleague Julian Benz we appreciate that   you're spending the next 30 minutes with us.  Our topic today: Are cloud-based signatures   the right choice for my business? and  Julian will cover that topic afterwards.   If you're having any questions, please simply  type them in the Q&A button at the bottom of your   Zoom window. I will compile and collect  them and we try to answer all of them at   the end of the session. If we cannot cover all  questions we simply reply via an email to you. StepOver is really a pioneer in  the electronic digital signature.   We started more than 20 years ago as a small  hardware company out of Stuttgart, Germany   and still today everything we do is designed  and manufactured in Stuttgart in Germany.   But today we are an international  business covering all aspects   of the eSignature, so with StepOver you  can sign on a signature pad obviously,   but also on your smartphone, on your computer,  on a tablet or whatever device you're having. And   you can do that either on-premise based, in the  cloud or on your computer. On our website you find   a lot of small and big examples with small and  big customers from projects all over the world.   With that I want to hand over to Julian  who will cover our today's topic:   Are cloud-based signature the right  choice for my business? Over to you Julian Thank you Joachim. A very welcome from me as  well. My name is Julian Benz, I am a key account   manager with StepOver and I'm responsible here for  overseeing our international partner and reseller   network worldwide and help our international  customers implement our eSignature solutions. So   if you decide to join us  afterwards on the journey to   implement eSignatures in your business  you'll likely see my face quite a bit. So let's have a look at what we're going  to talk about today. Obviously cloud-based   signatures is going to be our topic and we're  going to talk about it from your perspective,   so you know what questions you need yourself  to be answered. The first one is going to be:   Why should i consider the switch to eSignatures?  We're then going to talk about the different   business use cases, that you can digitize and  I'm going to give you a couple of examples   from our customers where you then might be  able to reproduce them in your environment. Then we're going to have a look at: What type of  eSignatures does my business require? There are   three different types, so it's important to  know which one is the right choice for you.   And then we're going to look at the implementation  timeline, a very important thing for your project   managing team. We're then going to get to the  nitty gritty which is the live demonstration and   a little bit less gritty which is the compliance  of eSignatures but equally important of course.   And then at the end we're going to have a summary  on a single slide so you've got all of the   information present there and we're then going to  go over into the Q&A session so as Joachim said,   if you've got any questions throughout this  webinar, please post them at the bottom or   afterwards send us an email and we'll do our  best to get back to you as soon as possible. So: Why should I consider  the switch to eSignatures?   Electronic signatures enable  a completely digital workflow   without the requirement for breaking media.  So what that means is, at the moment if you   don't have electronic signatures you might  start a process digitally, such as having a   PDF form. Then you print it out and give it to  your customer to fill out, your customer signs   it hands it back to you. And then you need to scan  it in and convert that information from the piece   of paper into your back-end system. That takes a  lot of time. So the major reason why you should   consider the switch to eSignatures is the return  on investment and that return on investment comes   from a couple of key factors. The first one is  the decrease in idle labor time. Your employees   no longer need to wait for printers to spit  out 50 pages and check they're all in order.   There's no more scanning of documents involved  and there's no more filing of paperwork involved. Obviously paper contracts have got a  significant resource cost attached to them.   With eSignatures you no longer have  the requirement for paper or toner.   You no longer need to spend money to  mail the contracts out to customers.   And probably the single most cost reducing factor  that few businesses think about is the physical   archive that's no longer required. For example  when we we've got our our vaccination centers   around Germany as our customers and for every  patient that they are handing out a jab to, and   at the moment we are onto our third vaccine, there  is paperwork required and that paperwork needs to   be signed and then stored. And if you're thinking  about how many citizens they are vaccinating,   there's a massive amount of paperwork that needs  to be stored for a considerable amount of time to   comply with health regulations. All of that is no  longer the case if you use electronic signatures. From a contract completion time it will  only take you seconds instead of days   to complete a contract. So let's say you are  on-boarding a new employee and you're trying to   woo them away from other potential opportunities,  you're able to offer them that they can sign their   contracts with you like this. And both of  you have got the original copy. Equally,   especially from a sales side of point, customers  are less likely to change their mind if they can   sign something immediately, rather than them  saying, in principle yes, i want to sign it   and then it takes two to three days for the  paperwork to move between the two parties. Of course electronic signatures drastically reduce  your carbon footprint. Most of that comes from   the resources that are involved and with a lot  of companies now going net zero or even negative,   this might be an important step in achieving  that goal for your company. And then finally,   the probably one of the most costly  processes to rectify is when mistakes happen.   If you're using a electronic signature solution  that is integrated into your back-end system,   you will encounter no more filing errors  because a computer takes part of that.   You can also auto validate signatures. So let's  say you've got a contract with three parties, each   of these parties needs to sign the contract at one  location. That contract will not be accepted back   into your system until our system says all three  signatures have been successfully placed on there.   So that prevents things like having uncompleted  contracts and then only noticing it down the   line a couple of weeks later and then obviously  a cost involved with backtracking, trying to find   who hasn't signed it yet. And of course you have  the option to automatically extract information   from form fields that have been inserted. So if a  customer fills in a bit of extra information that   you didn't have beforehand you can simply then  add it automatically to your back-end system. So: Which business use-cases can i  digitise? There's obviously the typical   face-to-face which you might encounter at trade  counters, bank tellers, car rental counters.   There is video sales, very big in the insurance  sector, because it allows you a instant contract   completion. We're going to have a look at  one of those examples with a QR-code later.   Very big during the pandemic and probably for the  future as well are remote signatures. You can send   the signatory documents and they can review it  and then sign it in the comfort of their own home. You can sign at external clients, so it enables  contract completion at the customer site or that   could be also used for delivery of high valued  goods, where you want the person to sign it there   and then but it's not sufficient to simply have an  x, like you do with UPS for example. You actually   need a signature that holds up in front of a court  of law because the goods might be valued at 10.000   to 15.000 Euros. A unique thing that StepOver is  able to offer you: As a cloud signature solution   it might be counter-intuitive that we have an  offline option, but if you use our Android and   iOS Apps you can synchronize the documents before  they are signed and then simply once a connection   is re-established it will automatically update  these contracts and send them back to the server.   This is especially relevant for all of our  maintenance customers who do a lot of servicing of   equipment in factories with thick rebar concrete  walls or sometimes even underground in basements   where a data signal is blocked hence they're  unable to sign online in those environments.   And then of course - internal use cases.  For example remote on-boarding of employees,   internal approval with digital certificates  such as training, payroll, etc. So: What type of eSignature does my business  require? The type of eSignature required   really depends on the type of documents that  you want to sign. There are basically three   types of electronic signatures under eIDAS and the  equivalents worldwide - that is the law regulating   electronic signatures. You have Simple Electronic  Signatures, Advanced Electronic Signatures   and Qualified Electronic Signatures. Advanced  Electronic Signatures, or otherwise called AES   are the industry standard because they are not  as complicated as Qualified Electronic Signatures   and they're much more secure than Simple  Electronic Signatures which are basically   just a picture of a signature. AES can be  used for around 95% to 98% of your documents,   some of our customers can even sign 100% of their  documents with Advanced Electronic Signatures.   QES, Qualified Electronic Signatures are only  used if they're really legally necessary,   as it requires external identification of the  signatory which is not only expensive but also   time intensive. So that's why AES is most  likely going to be the right choice for you. What kind of documents can i sign with AES?  You've got the typical employee onboarding,   internal approval, standard contracts, training,  board meetings, agreements such as non-disclosure   agreements or T&Cs and things like delivery  orders. If you have specific documents that   you're unsure about, please feel free to  reach out to us and we can help you navigate   depending on the location that you're based  in whether AES is the right choice for you.   There are exclusions where you require  Qualified Electronic Signatures - they are   predominantly in family law and for specific  property transactions, so for example if you   want to sign wills or deeds for houses, you will  likely require a Qualified Electronic Signature. So: What implementation timeline am i looking  at? It's a very important question and the short   answer is: the majority of our customers  are ready to sign within 1 to 6 weeks. So   that is from starting implementation to the  first customer signing a contract. However   that implementation timeline varies based  on the solution you select of course:   If you opt for our off-the-shelf solution,  called webSignatureOffice Live, which we're   going to look at in a moment during the  demo, then that is a lot quicker because   it can be used on every major browser and the  setup is instant. So for example you could   sign up today for free, get 10 free documents  each month, there's no subscription required,   simple pay-as-you-go structure, however it  only allows for a shallow workflow integration.  If your business is looking for something more  substantial so to integrate a solution seamlessly   into your workflow and completely automate a  process in the background you require our software   development kit, which also brings you the highest  return on investment which we talked about before Our software development is called  webSignatureOfficeAPI and it is either available   as Software as a Service you can run that on AWS  or especially relevant for our European customers   StackIT, because they are compliant with the  privacy shield agreement so all of this data stays   within the EU and does not migrate over. There's  no chance the data might migrate over to the US.   But of course you can also host on your premise  if you want even on your own big cloud-computing   platform where we also support Microsoft Azure or  Google Cloud so depending on whether you select   Software as a Service or hosting on premise you've  got a couple of different options. At StepOver   we put an emphasis on making sure that  all of our API documentation is very   well done for integrators and it allows you to  design your own customer branding with your own   color schemes, logos and customized wording. And  of course because both solutions are cloud-based   they are operating system independent and  they also have the dedicated Android and   iOS apps that you can you and your customers  can download for free from the app stores. So let's get to the live demonstration  and the compliance of signatures.   Another very important question for you to  consider is: Who can actually sign the documents   that i'm sending them? And again you'll be pleased  to hear the short answer is: Everyone. There's no   managed hardware required, no registration,  no subscription or payment details necessary.   So: What kind of features can i expect  from a cloud signature provider?   Of course you want to be able  to sign both, with handwritten   or certificate-based signatures. You can also use  templates or let your back-end take care of that. You can have audit trails which  is very important especially for   our financial customers, they require that. And  you can have a feature called envelopes, which   is basically a bundling of multiple documents  together into one signature request. So let's   say you have to one of your customer needs to sign  four different documents you can simply put them   all together and you can even include features  like a forced upload request if they for example   need to upload a scan of the ID or you could even  have a forced download where they need to download   the terms and conditions or the NDA before  they're able to initiate the signature process.   And we support two-factor-authentication.  Basically you can either secure your documents   with a password or you can use our SMS one-time  passcode which acts as a secondary authentication   that is also logged inside the audit trail. So  let's get to the live demo of webSignatureOffice.   We're going to have first to look at the  click-to-sign certificate, we're then going   to move on to handwritten with the Brilliance Pad  which is here on the left side of my desk and then   we're going to have a look at the QR-code that I  mentioned earlier in conjunction with a browser   and finally we're going to look at the compliance,  we're going to validate these signatures. So here you're able to see our user interface for  the webSignatureOffice Live. All you need to do is   simply press to upload a document, I'm going to  use the "example document webinar" and it brings   up the document here ready for your viewing. You  can zoom in, zoom out, you can skip pages if you   want to and here at the bottom you see we've got  three different fields that we want to sign now. First of all we're going to press in the top  left here to place a signature field and now   gives us three options: I can either have a  new guest signer where i can put in a name.   That is if I want a customer that I have not  previously engaged with to sign a document.   I can choose one of my contacts,  so that could be employees or   regular people that I do business  with or what we're going to do now is   iIwant to sign myself or in this session so  I simply press submit and now I can either   pull up the signature field or i can simply  press and then drag it to the size that I   want. To now sign I simply press sign now as  it suggests and it gives me now the option:   do I want to sign with a handwritten one or do  I want to sign with a click-to-sign certificate. I click here to sign. It now prompts me to  put in my password as well as an optional   text. I generally use my job title and I can  add a date and a time stamp. I simply press   sign and within a second we have now a digital  certificate in here which holds the same validity   as a handwritten signature. To sign with a pad it  works very much the same, we simply select myself,   we move the signature part in the location that we  wanted to go in, sign now this time we obviously   select handwritten and now we have three options:  we can either sign with the signature pad, we can   sign with a smartphone or tablet which we're going  to use for this use case here or we could even   sign on this display for example I've got a Lenovo  Thinkpad X1 here which has got a touchscreen   with a with a stylus so I could sign directly  on the display if I have a Tablet-PC available.   But for now we're going to use the signature pad  and on the right-hand side you should be able to   see my phone with the signature pad right  next to me so you can see what's happening. So it is now connecting to the signature pad,   transferring the data onto it and then once  it's ready it's going to allow me to sign and confirm it. And you'll see that - so the transmission  of the phone is a bit slow - you'll see that   within a couple of seconds you've  got that signature inserted here.   The last one we're going to look at is placing  a signature field and we're going to this time   use a QR-code to sign it. So that could be  for example that video sales that we earlier   talked about. We again move the field  to the right size so we want, sign now,   handwritten, smartphone and if you look to my  phone now I'm going to simply scan this QR-code   it's going to open up it's going to prompt me to  open a URL and then it gives me the choice: Do I   want to sign either with our app, but you cannot  assume that your customer will download the app,   so I'm going to select I'm going to sign with my  Chrome browser. I simply press that and then it   brings up the document for myself. I now need to  accept the terms and conditions because that is   a requirement under EU law, that both parties  agree to sign electronically. So I accept them   and now I can review the contract in front of me.  I already see the two existing signatures in there   as well as the highlighted blue field which  means this is where I should sign. To initiate   the signing process I press "start signing"  and it automatically takes me to the first   field that I need to sign. If i now want  to make the field a bit bigger all I can do   is simply turn it over into landscape mode  and then sign in here with my finger or a pen. "QR-code" And now this is a finished document. As  a customer I could now press onto the   small button here in the top to simply download  the document and I've got the original document   and as well you can see here that the employee on  the other side has got the same document present. To now finish this document I simply need to   make sure that all of the  signatures are going to be embedded. And I can now download it, so we see this is the  finished document. So let's talk about validation   of the signatures. I'm going to download document  and I'm going to open it up in Adobe. You can use   any free PDF reader that you want to use, Adobe  is simply the industry standard hence why I'm   going to use it here. I'm just going to pull it up  here to the right going to zoom out a bit so it's   not that big and you see here we've got now the  three signatures present. If you hover over them   you'll also get the feedback this  is a field that has been filled in.   So let's validate those signatures: All we need  to do to validate a signature is simply press   right click, then select "validate signature"  and it's going to give me a feedback here.   The check mark means all of the certificates  check out and the most important sentence is here:   "The document has not been modified since the  signature was applied". That is what a court of   law is going to look for if there's ever dispute  about this document because it basically confirms   the integrity of the document. So let's say you've  got a 50-page document where you sign on page 49,   this sentence means that nobody has attempted  to switch out or manipulate any data or any   entire page of the document and that the  signature has not been compromised. So this means   this document is valid. And it now gives  me a bit of more information, for example,   if we go to signature properties I can see the  serial number of the pad that i used to sign   this document. I can also see the hard drive ID  inside of my computer as well as the username JUB   for Julian Benz that i have been signed onto to my  Windows account and i also get the date stamp and   the exact time stamp with the second when I signed  this document. So if you compare that to a paper   contract you get a lot more information here to  pinpoint the identity of the signatory in terms of   where exactly this document was signed, which  hardware was used, so if there's ever dispute,   the electronic signature allows you here to  have a lot more information present to prove   your case that the signatory that you claim to  have signed the document is actually the person   that you wanted to sign the document with.  If we're looking at the QR-code instead,   again it gives me the feedback the document has  not been modified since the signature was applied,   and importantly because I had my GPS located  on my phone it has also picked up on the GPS   data so if you type that into Google right  now you'll see exactly where my office is   located inside my house, that's how precise it  is. So for example if you're delivering goods   and you want to make sure that you've got to  prove that you have delivered them actually at   the entrance of the construction site where that  machine was required, you simply instruct your   employee to turn on GPS when they collect the  signature and that allows you then a concrete   pin pointing together with the date and the  time as well as you still have the signature   image of the person who signed it to say  okay this person has accepted the goods. So that was the compliance of the eSignature. Moving on to our summary. So the immediate return  on investment, as i said earlier, is obviously   coming through saved idle labor time, through  workflow optimization, reduced resource costs,   quicker contract completion and the reduction  in your carbon footprint. You can digitise   typical use-cases such as face-to-face,  internal approval, remote signatures,   go to external clients or even sign offline. If  you feel like we did not cover your use-case and   you want to know whether your use-case is feasible  for electronic signatures just reach out to us   we're happy to have a conversation with you, we  can give you a short demo of of the solutions and   we'll figure it out together. But so far,  very few customers we've been unable to help. You can sign over 95% of your documents  with Advanced Electronic Signatures.   Again if you've got certain questions  about which documents can you sign,   please just reach out and we'll do our best  to help. You're looking at an implementation   timeline of usually 1 to 6 weeks, however it is of  course dependent on the depth of the integration   and your choice between hosting  on-premise or Software as a Service. All of our solutions are eIDAS and GDPR  compliant. You saw it's a very easy validation   of the signatures and our company prides itself  on the highest security standards in the industry. So i now give over to Joachim again for  our Q&A session. Thank you for listening. Well thank you very much Julian, that was  great. I have a lot of questions here,   let me we have one minute left here,  one is: I'm working for a big company,   which stakeholders do I have to involve  to get that eSignature working with us?  Good question. So the important departments  will probably be workflow management,   so your IT department, it's always good to consult  your legal department, especially when it comes to   the validity of certain signatures for certain  contracts and your data privacy officers simply   to make sure that you're only capturing  the information that you actually require. Thank you. Another one or two questions about  biometric data: What biometric data can be   collected to identify a person or signature?  Yeah so it generally depends on the device, but   commonly the biometric data that is collected  are the signature pressure levels, so how hard   you sign and how soft you sign along the  signature, the acceleration deceleration   and the direction of writing, which is especially  important when it comes to things like crossing a   t and dotting an i. All of those are subconscious  behaviors that a handwriting expert can use to   later determine whether the signatory is  actually the person that they claim to be. Okay last question for today: Can i start with a  small proof of concept and then scale up gradually   on the same server and just  grow that thing in our company?  Certainly, so you can either do that or we  also provide a test server that will allow   you to try the integration and then once you're  ready you can switch to a production server   when the rollout commences and then scale  it from there. So you've got both options   either to stay on the same server from  the beginning or to integrate it all on   a test server and once you're ready  start implementation there and then. Perfect Julian, thank you. We are on  time, thanks everybody in that call.   If we can help just visit our website, drop us  an email to Julian or myself - info@stepover.com   you'll find us and we'll get back to you. We have a last slide with our next seminar   which is on the 28th of April.   Topic is: Deep dive into our eSignature  software called the eSignatureOffice.  We will have a spanish-speaking webinar  in between and invite everybody,   but the next english speaking is on  the 28th of April. Thanks everybody,   enjoy your lunch break and see you next time. Thank you, thank you Julian. Bye.