Today, the banking sector is keeping pace with new trends, and eSignature is one such trend to be embraced by the financial sector. An increasing number of financial organizations are leveraging robotics for automating repetitive and complex tasks that would require significant resources. Paperless processes are important for digital transformation and deploying automated solutions can improve customer experience, cut costs and increase efficiency.
eSignatures are crucial for a successful transition and paperless banking is gaining momentum across all industries. Why eSignatures are important for the financial industry? What are the benefits that organizations would get when electronic signature solutions are deployed?
Minimized Costs
Although eSignature solution would require substantial investment, long-term savings outweigh the costs incurred. Paper is affordable, but when all the costs are added up, paper becomes expensive. Enterprises need to take printing and photocopying costs into consideration, especially in banks where there is a high need for full audit trails.
Storage costs is another saving that goes with paperless office. Organizations that aren’t using digital solutions should retain paper copies of signed documents, which mean they need to invest in a filing, storing, and auditing documents. If multiple parties are involved, the costs will multiply simultaneously.
With eSignature solutions, documents can be stored in cloud systems, thus eliminating the need for files, document repositories and security costs. Other penalties such as fraud and non-compliance can also be curbed. Paper records would result in compliance issues as they can easily be altered and handwritten signatures can be easily forged. Moreover, paper documents can be easily lost or would result in significant loss due to fraudulent activity.
Electronic signatures protect documents integrity and with automated eSignature solutions, a small change would render the signature as invalid. The identity of the signer cannot be tampered due to timestamp and identity verification parameters.
And significant costs will occur to circulate and deliver documents to multiple parties. Paper costs can be a significant burden on the company’s bottom line while the cost of electronically transferring the document is nominal.
Improved Productivity
Paper documents are required to be sending from one party to another, which would take days or weeks to circulate to all parties.
Greater Compliance and Security
Banking sector should ensure that the client’s personal information should not fall in the wrong hands. This includes customer statements, investment & legal records and other documents required for modern banking.
Electronic signatures provide trust and assurance as they use unique signing keys for every signer. This links the user’s identity to the signed document and verifies the signature. Additionally, the solution can provide you detailed audit information on user actions (including dates, and the time of signing), IP addresses, authentication mechanism and signatures.
As security is the key concern in the banking sector, it is important to understand the difference between eSignature types and validity.
Time Savings
How much time it will take for a paper document to get signed by multiple parties? It is evident how extreme things can get with paper-based signatures. The entire signing process can be completed in minutes with eSignatures. Multiple parties can easily collaborate and sign documents in a very short span. This would inturn result in huge time savings.
Reduce Paper
Paper usage has skyrocketed with companies using more and more paper to meet their needs. The usage of electronic signature minimizes the amount of paper generated from printing and mailing documents.
Quick Decisions
Enforcing decisions is time-taking as several documents need to be signed and approved by multiple stakeholders. The more time, the signing process will take, the more time it might take to implement the decision. Embracing eSignature would speed up the signing process and makes it quick to implement the decisions. With stakeholders signing off the required documents quickly, you can get your decisions implemented when needed.
Client Satisfaction
Client satisfaction is really important and eSignature can help improve the client satisfaction. eSignature enables your clients to sign anytime, anywhere and on any device whenever they want. The signing process can be simplified with eSignatures and your clients will be certainly satisfied with the way they sign documents on the go.
With these benefits, it is easy to understand why it is important for financial institutions to adopt eSignature solution.
Guest article written by: Kevin Peterson is a content marketing enthusiast, freelance writer at SutiSoft, specializing in Business, ERP, Technology and Cloud/SaaS trends.