Consumers Driving Adoption of E-Signatures 12 Years After Federal ESIGN Law

 electronic signature solutions with the largest e-signature deployments, today marked the 12th anniversary of the federal ESIGN law by sharing stories of organizations and end-users who’ve embraced e-signature technology and changed the way they do business. A series of blogs will be posted on www.silanis.com/blog and blog.e-signlive.com throughout the ESIGN anniversary week. “This law opened the door to mass adoption of e-signatures. ESIGN moved e-signatures outside the four walls by providing the legislative framework for organizations to conduct customer-facing transactions across state lines,” said Tommy Petrogiannis, Silanis CEO and co-founder. “One of the biggest shifts in the past year is the power of the consumer in driving change within organizations of all levels. Banking and insurance customers, for example, are basically telling their service providers, ‘I want you to change the way you’re doing business with me.’ E-signatures are a big part of creating that new customer experience.” Analyst firm Forrester Research recently said, “Customers, who are more comfortable with the Web and mobile apps, are now driving e-signature adoption.” E-signatures make life convenient and result in faster turnaround. They save time and gas, and make it unnecessary to drive to a branch or retail storefront just to sign documents. They accelerate processes so that virtually any transaction – mortgage, car loan, student loan, insurance application, credit card account opening, etc. – can be completed 100 percent electronically.  For example:

• 21st Century enables customers to sign up online for auto insurance and complete the application 100 percent electronically from the convenience of their home.
• US Bank transformed their consumer lending process from paper to electronic across 3,000+ branches. As a result, customers can complete their consumer or small business loan 100 percent electronically – and no longer need to wait for the bank to manually process paper on the back-end.
• US Army personnel are no longer exposed to enemy fire in transporting forms for approval. The use of electronic signatures and forms has completely eliminated the need for soldiers to organize combat patrols to get documents signed.
• State of Vermont’s Department of Information and Innovation uses e-signatures to speed up the vendor contracting process and improve services to citizens, while also minimizing their carbon footprint.
• Signature Mortgage customers now e-sign over 90 percent of the company’s mortgage applications, and reach the closing table in 25 days versus the industry average 45-60 days.
• Aplifi customers now receive their insurance policy 75 percent faster with electronic signatures.

. Enterprises across banking, insurance, government and other sectors have leapt the chasm from early technology adoption to broad acceptance. Last year, Silanis’ revenues more than doubled and as the size of the company’s customer base grows, so too does the volume of transactions processed. Silanis recently optimized its e-signature software to the extent where a single deployment could process billions of documents a year.

These are only the early impacts of ESIGN. By 2020, analysts expect that the majority of electronic transactions will be launched from mobile devices, which will accelerate both e-signature adoption and ROI. To this point, dealers at BMW Financial are already innovating with iPads to capture signatures from customers to accelerate the dealer self-inspection process when a leased vehicle is returned. In the insurance industry, Country Financial enabled their sales agent force to complete an insurance application face-to-face with a customer at their location of choice, in one session.

“We are proud to celebrate our customers today – and every day – by providing them the best customer experience ever in each contact with our company, technology and services,” said Michael Laurie, VP of strategic planning and Silanis co-founder. “No matter whether a customer needs e-signatures on-premises, hosted on the cloud or as a SaaS solution, whether they are a small business or a multi-national, a civilian government agency or the military, our e-signature solutions can be deployed to automate virtually any process, for any organization. That’s one of the ways the market defines leadership.”

About Silanis Silanis is the most widely used e-signature solution in the world, responsible for processing over 600 million documents annually. Since the company was founded in 1992, our solutions have strengthened the business processes of thousands of organizations, including four of the top North American banks, eight of the top 15 insurance companies and the entire US Army, among others. Companies and government organizations around the globe depend on Silanis to accelerate business transactions, improve customer experience and reduce costs while improving compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. Silanis’ on-premise, cloud and SaaS e-signature solutions eliminate manual, paper-based processing and enable e-commerce and e-government transactions to be electronically executed from start to finish.