Electronic signature (eSignature) has become not only commonplace but expected in nearly all industries. The technology provides a straightforward way to streamline business processes that require document sharing, review, and signature. eSignature simplifies and adds convenience for the signers to complete and sign documents when and where it’s convenient for them. Further, the resulting complete digital model provides efficiencies, security, and cost savings. A component of the eSignature process flow that can frustrate front-line employees and be time-consuming is working with documents to ensure the proper placement of signature and initial fields along with the identification of additional data elements. The solution to this is generally found in the use of templates to establish a set of rules for eSignature transaction automation.
Templates are a set of instructions that help a system determine recipients, place signature fields, and sometimes “recognize” the actual documents themself. The capabilities of templates in most eSignature solutions are relatively simple and often require user intervention to finalize the document package before it can be sent. Additionally, the limited flexibility of templates often results in significant administrative effort both in their creation and particularly in their maintenance. Ideally, a template is smart enough not to need any user intervention—recognize the document, determine the number of signers, capture signing party information, place signature fields, capture data for indexing, and more.
We have designed our templates to be intelligent. With IMM eSign, template creation and maintenance are kept simple so that a financial institution (FI) employee can create a new template in less than ten minutes and/or adjust an existing one to adapt to document changes in even less time. We prioritized this capability knowing from experience that there are as many variations on process and data requirements as there are banks and credit unions. Therefore, FIs are equipped to painlessly build templates tailored to their institution’s specific needs rather than trying to retrofit a standard one.
IMM eSign templates not only address the need for signature locations and signing party information but also for data capture. eSign automatically recognizes an incoming document and extracts data that can be used for indexing and archiving the document into the institution’s imaging/ECM system at the conclusion of the transaction. This unique capability combined with eSign’s native ability to interface with any imaging system further reduces manual processes. It additionally provides cost savings by eliminating the need for expensive custom-built or coded integrations required by other eSignature providers.
Something as straightforward as the number of signers on a given document can cause maintenance headaches for other eSignature systems. In the financial industry, there are frequent cases where a given document type might require one, two, three, or more signers. With most other solutions, a unique template is required for every possible combination. However, this is not the case with IMM eSign, which employs smart templates that recognize signing party information and place signature or initial fields based on the number of parties. This means there is only one template to create regardless of the number of potential signers, and further, only one template to maintain as well.
IMM eSign also handles the recognition of each document individually rather than as part of a batch, further reducing the complexities of template management. Users submitting documents do not need to concern themselves with the number of signatories or other differences. Instead, our software is intelligent enough to recognize those distinctions and act accordingly. And given that change is inevitable, IMM eSign has been purpose-built to make implementing these changes quick and easy.
IMM eSign templates are easy to understand, quick to create, and can be administered by FI employees with the certainty that nothing is lost in translation. They are yet another feature of our comprehensive eSignature platform that simplifies document management without an array of add-on charges.