eSignatures are a crucial step towards secure Digital Transformation

eSignatures are a crucial step towards secure Digital Transformation

Pre-Internet, we wouldn’t have left sensitive documents lying around the office, so why would we leave them open and vulnerable on our digital platforms now? Andy Wilson, UK Site Lead at Dropbox and HelloSign, explains the best way to protect your documents.

COVID-19 has increased Digital Transformation across many sectors such as legal and real estate, and we’ve seen a particular focus on the use of eSignatures as a quick and secure way of finalising an agreement. But without eSignatures, how secure is that final sign-off? 

All businesses have to store personal and sensitive information. From contracts to the personal data of customers and employees, we have a breadth of documents that have to be protected in ways specified by security law. Pre-Internet, we wouldn’t have left sensitive documents lying around the office, so why would we leave them open and vulnerable on our digital platforms now? The real key to keeping documents secure, is having simple yet robust solutions that fit into current processes as seamlessly as possible. The less employees have to change their behaviour, the more likely the solution will succeed in the long-term. 

For you, your employees and your customers

With 41% of consumers claiming that they will never return to a business post security-breach, according to PCI Pal Global Research, it’s never been more important to ensure that your business is doing everything it can to avoid preventable security issues. Documents fulfilled via eSignatures such as HelloSign keep users on a single, secure platform, which avoids stray copies being left on hard drives and email chains. The safeguarding of sensitive data for your stakeholders and customers simply cannot be left to chance; and eSignatures are one of the growing number of digital tools that can help secure this information.

Bear in mind that a small business in the UK is successfully hacked every 19 seconds, according to Hiscox, and we begin to see the scale of the problem. It only takes one successful hack to discredit a reputation of trust built over years. There’s also the financial cost to think about, which in many cases can be crippling to a business.

Creating space for your business to grow

For years people have backed up physical files by scanning and turning them into digital versions. But modern, cloud-based documents can be more secure and a lot less fuss. In this current age of Digital Transformation, there are lots of opportunity for tech-driven solutions that can streamline and optimise several different areas of your business. 

For example, if your sales team is working hard and significantly increasing your volumes of new business, eSignatures can make the contract signing process a lot more seamless. Many companies have already started using electronic invoices, so it just makes sense to combine your payment and contract systems into one easy to manage, digital process. AdvicePay, a financial planning service, has done exactly that. By using HelloSign API, it’s been able to cut the time it spends managing contracts in half, leaving it with more time to grow the business. 

Relying on paper contracts can be a slow and cumbersome process today. Needing to courier copies back and forth, and then comes the challenge of storing and retrieving huge amounts of paper. For growing businesses, it brings the challenge of running out of physical storage space. With the added time spent organising and maintaining them, physical documents have become a costly and unnecessary burden.

In the cloud, there is unlimited space for business to grow, and leveraging tools such as eSignatures allows you to free up both your business’ and your customers’ space and time.

Staying ahead of the Digital Transformation curve 

Due to the pandemic, Digital Transformation across industries has accelerated rapidly over the past year. Digital Transformation is not just about adopting tools or improving workflows. It’s a business transformation to put the customer experience back at the centre of all decisions, and to serve that interest through technology.

By adopting a tool that puts the customer first, removing the burden of signing important documents, making the process mobile, user-friendly, secure and fast, companies that have not necessarily fully digitally transformed have a great opportunity to revolutionise a key part of their business – signing documents. 

We need secure solutions that can seamlessly integrate into businesses’ existing frameworks, so that employees can easily adopt them and fortify their organisation’s defences in the process. eSignatures are one great example of this and should be on the agenda of all businesses, as they recalibrate post-pandemic.

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