Digital Transformation and Electronic Signature: the last mile

Nowadays, the customers’ ability to control their interactions with enterprises has much improved in comparison to some years ago. This is the reason why those enterprises who aim at understanding and satisfying their customers, within a global and digital economy, have to make a conscious effort to create a positive and relevant customer experience.  

In order to achieve this goal, it is surely necessary to work on the organisational aspects and processes, adopting new business models. However, it is also important to invest in innovative technologies, in tune with the needs of both customers and staff: together, they take part in processes which are getting wider and wider, forsaking a clear distinction between inside and outside the enterprise.

Furthermore, it is important to remember that the expectations on all our user experiences are ever more based on very high standards, which have been introduced in recent years by the biggest players on technology in the consumer world.

In view of this, in order to rise to the challenge of digital transformation, digital signature is, undoubtedly, an extremely important technology, both for redesigning processes and for offering a positive user experience.

In many cases, nowadays, the document’s signature is still a non-digitised step in the process. All the efforts invested in speeding up the conclusion of an enterprise’s process are, thus, in vain: the pen-and-paper procedure slows the process down, bringing us decades backwards, with a slow pace that, today, is not acceptable anymore. This is what we, in Intesi Group, have long been calling “the last mile” of digital transformation.

The technological solutions for digital signature available nowadays are able to fully meet both the organisational requirements and the user experience ones, whilst fully complying with the required regulatory legislation.

Within Europe, the regulatory aspect has been addressed in a structured manner by the eIDAS Regulation, which aims at the construction of a European digital single market. Since 1st July 2016, the eIDAS Regulation has ensured the full interoperability among all the countries in the Union, urging them to acknowledge that the electronic signature carries a legal value equivalent to the handwritten signature.

The Regulation also recognises the legal validity of the Cloud Signature, thus removing the need to use smart-cards. This aspect has an interesting impact on the user experience. In fact, thanks to the Cloud Signature, the user has now the possibility to use his own smartphone to have sole control over his own digital signature, even from mobile: namely, whenever and wherever we want.  

In order to facilitate the use of the signature, Intesi Group provides, firstly, a mobile app (Valid) and the Cloud Signature service (Time4Mind) APIs, which can be integrated to the enterprise applications already in operation (ERP, BPM, or another document-based or workflow system). For those who need ready-to-use solutions, instead, we provide different products that meet the usual kind of need or working method: to apply the signature on documents stored in public storages (Time4Store), to have a digital signature book or to manage authorisation processes (Valid Sign), to sign from every desktop application with the fluidity of a printout (Signature Printer Driver), or sending an email (Signature Mail Gateway), or even to apply the signature while chatting (Cloud Signature Chatbot).