Not in good order (NIGO): Prevent agreement delays early
Not in Good Order: Why the best time to fix NIGO is before review
You know the moment. An agreement, attachment, or supporting document that you thought was done comes back and it’s not in good order. An important field never got placed during setup, so page four came back with a blank field. The ID they attached expired last month. The address on the form doesn't match the address on your client's utility bill.
Nothing dramatic, but the workflow can't advance to the next step. So you email the customer, ask them to do it again, and wait.
That's NIGO: Not in Good Order.
NIGO is the catch-all term for an agreement that can't proceed as submitted. According to AI wealth-tech company JIFFYAI, “Industry estimates suggest that 20% to 40% of wealth management account-opening submissions are not in good order, meaning nearly one in three applications is rejected before processing can begin.”
Any single instance looks minor. Collectively, NIGO problems are one of the biggest silent taxes on a regulated workflow, because each NIGO error triggers the same expensive loop: Send it back, wait, re-review. Every loop costs days of cycle time, hours of your team's attention, and more of your customer's patience.
Rethinking the approach to Not In Good Order documents
Across regulated industries, NIGO is seen as a review problem. It is something reviewers catch after submission and send back for correction.
Why is NIGO (Not in Good Order) so difficult to eliminate?
Many organizations treat NIGO as a review problem. Agreements and attached documents, such as proof of employment or a pay stub, are reviewed, issues are identified, and files are sent back for correction. While this approach catches errors, it doesn't prevent them. As a result, organizations become trapped in a cycle of reviews, corrections, and resubmissions.
If problems are only discovered during review, they're being found and fixed at the most expensive point in the process: after the customer thinks the process is complete.
More reviewers and faster reviews don't solve that.
Instead of treating the symptoms, a better approach is to treat the cause.
NIGO issues don't begin at the review stage. They begin much earlier, in how the agreement was prepared, what information was collected and when, and whether the documents can be trusted.
If that's where NIGO originates, that's where it should be addressed. Rather than waiting for issues to surface during review, organizations can address them earlier and help agreements move forward with fewer exceptions and less rework.
That's the shift – transforming from reactive to proactive mode.
That's how we've designed the new NIGO capabilities in the Fall 2026 release of OneSpan Sign.
Unlike general-purpose eSignature tools that focus on the signing event, OneSpan Sign goes further and manages the steps that lead to the signature. That’s why OneSpan Sign’s latest features introduce a set of checks that work before the review, catching errors & omissions and other NIGO problems before they become an expensive manual fix.
Prevent errors when preparing agreements
NIGO scenarios can start before the agreement is even sent to the customer for signature. Preparing a document by hand means dragging every signature, date, and text field onto the page and assigning each one to the right person.
It's slow, and it's easy to get wrong. Miss a signature block, put a field on the wrong signer, forget a date, and the agreement goes out incomplete. It comes back the same way. The mistake wasn't made in review. It was made at the keyboard, minutes before sending.
How can organizations prevent NIGO before an agreement is sent?
Organizations can prevent many NIGO issues before an agreement is sent by using the Auto-Field Placement feature (coming soon) in OneSpan Sign to automatically prepare a document for electronic signature. This feature uses AI to place all signature blocks and other required fields, such as the data and name fields, in the correct location in the document. This reduces manual effort but still keeps a human in the loop to verify the template before it is sent out.
OneSpan Sign’s upcoming Auto-Field Placement feature takes the manual work off the sender.
- When a document is structured: For documents that already use structure, like a fillable PDF, an embedded tag, or a phrase that repeats on every page, OneSpan Sign reuses or places those fields automatically, exactly where they belong.
- When a document is not structured: AI reads the document and proposes the right type of field for the right signer. Nothing goes out until the sender has looked it over.
The same principle applies to all new OneSpan Sign features described in this article: OneSpan Sign does the work, but a human stays in control.
Set validation rules for form fields
Field placement is only half the problem. The OneSpan Sign Designer is now smarter about the other half: what actually gets typed into those fields.
Senders can now set validation rules so data entry has to match the format you need. For example, your form or document may require a phone number or a zip code. Or, it may require a dollar amount with two decimals. If it doesn't match, the signer is told exactly what to fix. That's the difference between a form that comes back in good order and one that comes back as an exception.
Catch problems before review
Agreements rarely stand alone. From a mortgage to an insurance claim, regulated processes depend on supporting documents provided by customers like proof of identity, proof of address, or income verification. Those attachments are a leading cause of NIGO problems.
Uploaded attachments cause the worst kind of back-and-forth because no one knows anything is wrong until a reviewer opens the file. That can be days after the customer submitted it. It’s when reviewers discover that the uploaded file is the wrong document type or it’s the correct document but expired, illegible, or missing a required detail. Every one of these is a resubmission.
How can organizations prevent NIGO caused by attachments uploaded by customers?
Uploaded attachments are one of the most common causes of NIGO. Missing, expired, illegible, or incorrect documents often aren't discovered until the manual review stage. This creates additional work for the customer and internal teams. Organizations can reduce rework by validating these documents as they are uploaded. If there's an issue, the customer can be prompted to upload a new file in real time.
A new OneSpan Sign feature, NIGO Document Validation, checks supporting documents automatically as they arrive:
- Is this the right type of document?
- Does it contain the information you asked for?
- Does it pass basic validity and completeness checks?
What used to be a manual read, with someone opening each file and comparing it against a checklist, now happens in seconds. This feature flags issues for your team to act on. It stays advisory, indicating what needs attention rather than rejecting anything silently. A human is always the one deciding.
The more complicated version of this problem is when every document is individually fine and the agreement still fails, because the information doesn't line up. The address on the agreement doesn't exactly match the address on the bank statement, a name is spelled slightly differently, or a date of birth is off by a digit. Normally that gets caught late, deep in review, by someone reading two documents side by side, and often it isn't caught at all.
OneSpan Sign's Cross-Document Validation (coming soon) compares the data on the supporting documents against the data on the agreement and flags the mismatches at intake.
Flexible Attachment Flow
Checks like these pay off if they happen at the right moment, and not every agreement deserves the same handling. A simple consent form and a complex loan package differ in sensitivity and complexity. How closely someone reviews them should reflect that.
That's why we're bringing more flexibility to the attachment flow:
- You'll have the ability to collect supporting attachments from customers before the signature. When the use case calls for it, internal teams can review and approve documents before the agreement even moves to signature.
- Or you can choose to collect supporting documents after signing.
The quiet win is where all of this happens: Documents stay inside the agreement workflow instead of travelling by email and SMS.
Tamper Checks: Verify documents haven’t been altered
In regulated workflows, being in good order isn't only about a document being present and complete. It's about being able to trust it hasn't been altered.
How can organizations trust the documents they're reviewing?
An agreement can still be Not in Good Order even when all required documents are present. In regulated workflows, organizations need confidence that attachments provided by signers, such as a pay stub or utility bill, have not been altered, manipulated, or misrepresented. Document checks help identify potential issues before they reach review.
This could take the form of doctored pay stubs, edited bank statements, or manipulated IDs. These are a growing fraud vector, and they're nearly impossible to catch without the help of AI. No reviewer can forensically examine every attachment on every agreement, so today most of this simply doesn't get checked.
OneSpan Sign’s Tamper Checks feature (coming soon) adds an advisory integrity layer. It looks for the signals that a document has been altered. For example, evidence that it was edited after it was created, an unexpected or inconsistent source, or dates that don't add up.
What it doesn't do is make the accept or reject decision for you.
The Tamper Checks feature does not automatically approve or reject documents.
- It flags what deserves a closer look, so your reviewers spend their attention where the risk is.
- It's also tuned to be precise, so it won't raise an alarm on every document.
This feature highlights potential concerns so reviewers can focus their attention where risk is most likely to exist. Humans remain responsible for the final decision.
The change: From reactive to proactive
Individually, each of these is a useful feature. Together they're something bigger.
Instead of waiting for a reviewer to discover what's wrong, you're addressing NIGO at every point where it starts – before the agreement reaches review at all.
That's a different operating model. Every check leaves an audit record, and it all works the same way whether your team uses the OneSpan Sign interface or your own systems through the API.
It's also a different approach to the market. While some eSignature tools optimize the signing event, OneSpan Sign focuses on the readiness of the whole agreement. It detects and helps resolve issues early so the process does not stall on its way to signature.
The takeaway is simple. NIGO can start during document preparation, information collection, attachment review, or document validation. OneSpan Sign gives you capabilities that detect those issues earlier so agreement workflows progress through each step with fewer delays, less rework, and greater confidence.
Interested in learning more? To see demos of these and other new OneSpan Sign capabilities, watch Beyond eSignature: 9 New Capabilities that Reduce Agreement Delays.
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Beyond eSignature: 9 New Capabilities That Reduce Agreement Delays
See how new capabilities help reduce manual effort and delays across the agreement process, accelerating signing workflows while preserving security, identity assurance, and defensibility.
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