Today, electronic digital signatures are slowly replacing the traditional signatures due to its use of use, security and verification by banks, governments and other regulatory authorities. A recent survey by a UK cyber security firm reveals that traditional signatures are on the verge of extinction because:

• 55% of UK adults hardly write their signature
• One out of every 5 individuals in UK don’t have a fixed signature
• 40% of all signatures are now made on digital devices with the use of e-pen or just your finger
• 15% of adults under the age 24 don’t even remember when they had last signed a piece of paper

And apart from digital transformation, electronic traditional signatures are also difficult for government and regulatory bodies to authenticate. 

How do Digital Signatures Work?

Electronic Digital signature comes with a digital fingerprint for documents and check for alterations throughout the document’s life cycle. Therefore, any unauthorized change made to the documents can be quickly detected, and both parties are notified. 

Electronic Digital signatures function in the following way:

• The sender uploads a document and sends it out for signatures
• Then a cryptographic has is generated with the sender’s private key and then is attached to the document.
• The encrypted document is then sent to recipients with the sender’s public key certificate. 
• The recipients thereafter decrypt the hash using the sender’s public key and generate a cryptographic hash for the same document.
• Now to ensure authenticity, both the hash values should match with each other. 

Widespread Adoption of Digital Signatures across Various Industries

The worldwide adoption of electronic digital signature continues to spike up due to its ease of use, quick return on investment, and the time saved that would normally be exhausted on manual processing. Following are the examples of how industries are adapting the electronic digital signature era:

• Financial Services Sector: Includes insurance policies, credit card applications, account openings, expense reporting and invoice processing
• Healthcare Sector: Comprising of new patient forms, processing of claims, processing of insurance benefits
• Real Estate Sector: Focusing on sales contracts, lease agreements, documents for residential and commercial use
• Government Bodies: Involving regulatory filings, tax returns, MOUs, administration documents.

Digital Signature Market Overview

In 2018, the digital signature market was valued as USD 3.06 billion and is expected to reach a value of USD 5.7 billion by 2024, at a CAGR of 21.5%, during the 2019-2024 forecast periods. Enterprises and business organizations are migrating from electronic to digital signature as it minimizes the risk of legal disputes and comes with stronger and conclusive evidence. 

Conclusion

Digital signatures today are the most advanced and safe type of electronic signatures. One can easily use them to comply with the most desired legal and regulatory requirements as they provide the highest levels of assurance about the identity and authenticity of the signer when every document they sign. 

In July 2018, Deutsche Bank accelerated account openings for its corporate and institutional clients by introducing the concept of electronic digital signature. As a result, digitizing account opening and document signings reduced the processing time and the involved cost. Some more benefits of digital signatures also include a good percentage reduction in the complete operating costs linked with account opening and the tiresome paper formalities is also reduced significantly. Even customer engagement can be aggrandized by deploying the suggested technology, which further helps you achieve best value of our work efforts. Digital signing applications enable you to collaborate, get documents signed easily from anywhere in the world, and bid goodbye to document woes. Though, no hard feelings for traditional ones!

Catherine Gomez