DocuSign claims to have has doubled its Australian customer base in eSignature and Digital Transaction Management (DTM) in the last financial year, taking on more than 1,000 local customers since launching in the region two years ago.

These include local companies CBP Lawyers, Commonwealth Bank, Domain, HashChing, LinkGroup, McDonalds, Optus, Origin Energy, Scouts ACT, Telstra, and others.

The company says is doubling its local workforce in response, and expanding its Sydney office headquarters while moving to 57 Pitt Street and adding to its staff in Melbourne.

Brad Newton, vice president of DocuSign ANZ said, “More and more Australian businesses are making the digital transformation with DocuSign, implementing our eSignature and DTM solutions for faster speed to results, decreased risk in security and compliance, and enhanced customer experiences.

“Our customers have found that simply removing paper from their business is one of the easiest, most effective and secure ways to drive competitive advantage and deliver immediate return through lower costs and accelerated growth.”

“We are in the very fortunate position as an esignature provider that’s heavily involved in the transaction management standard to have upwards of around 80% of market share in this space globally,” said Newton. 

“Having the only signature that is currently ISO27001 certified puts us in a unique category because one of the critical aspects of signature is the security of the system that facilitates signing of the contract. Authentication, security and availability are probably the three major components.”

Docusign is incorporating a range of additional layers of authentication beyond encryption in response to concerns about security ( see E-signatures, enforceable?  That is the question by Jack Evans, a lawyer with Australian firm Maddocks.)

“If you send a document to a person’s email address you have to assume the person opening the email is the right person. We offer different levels of authentication depending on the sensitivity of the document to be signed, the first level of secondary authentication we can offer straight out of the box is SMS, so you cannot esign a document you receive by email until you plug in an SMS code sent to your mobile,” said Newton.

“Other more sophisticated technology that is being used is voice authentication. We can embed a voice recording of the esignatory into the signed contract so that in the future of the legitimacy of the signature is questioned you can go back and do voice analysis to prove it was the same person. We are seeing banks use this for contracts in remote locations and this technology is also helping visually impaired people sign documents.

“Other simpler ways are in having Docusign sit behind the banks Internet banking platform, because you have to authenticate yourself with 100 points of identification to open the bank account in the first place. The bank then sets you up with a whole bunch of authentication techniques to get access to your accounts via the Internet. In these cases, the document sits behind the bank’s firewall and you must logon using your credentials to get access to the document which significantly improves the authentication of the user.

“Other technology such as facial recognition technology can be used electronically prior to someone actually signing the form to ensure it’s not just the person’s email address that we are using to authenticate the person. If it is a sensitive document and you do need those extra levels of authentication then we can apply those. Jut using the email address is compliant with the Electronic Transactions Act in Australia, it is up to the user of they want to ad those extra levels of authentication.”

DocuSign has found that the average customer savings is $A48 per document as going digital eliminates hard costs, such as paper, postage, storage and efficiency gains – as well as the manual processing, scanning and filing of information and associated rework from manual errors.

Additional findings show that 84% of transactions on the DocuSign Global Trust Network are completed in one day or less; 62% in one hour or less; and 51% in 15 minutes or less.

“Turning around contracts in minutes rather than days or even weeks; closing deals and being to recognise revenue immediately all have significant benefits for our customers’ bottom lines, which is vital no matter the economic times, but especially now,” said Newton. 

“Our overarching ambition is to have as many Australian and New Zealand companies join the DocuSign Global Trust Network and make the move to digital business as printing out a document to sign and post has no place in a today’s busy, on-the-go, mobile world.”