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E-signatures are revolutionising the way documents are handled by consumers and corporations alike. With the world growing increasingly digitised and the need for faster, smoother transactions, digital signatures are starting to play a significant role across different industries. A digital signature is a specific type of electronic signature that meets the technical needs and requirements of highly regulated industries.

The increasing adoption of digital signatures has been driven by pandemic-induced necessity, and businesses that have made the switch have benefited from user authentication, security, convenience, ease of access, productivity and ultimately profitability. Many industries, like human resource, legal and government sectors, have previously relied heavily on wet ink signatures and have benefitted the most from the shift to e-signatures and digital signatures.

Human Resource

Human resource is a vital part of any business and plays a significant role in any company’s success. The world of human resource is full of employment contracts that need to be signed, freelance contractors that need to be paid, and company policies that need to be endorsed. HR professionals have to deal with getting signed approvals on documents ranging from the mundane to the highly essential, all containing confidential and sensitive information. All this can sometimes be hard to manage and control, especially while manually tracking signatures and approval workflows. 

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‍Digital signing solutions offer great benefits to a company’s HR team. They speed up processes like employee onboarding and turnover as well as employee declarations. They reduce work inefficiency and delays caused by waiting for and manually checking and chasing signed approvals. Beyond just the HR team, a company that adopts document management and digital signing solutions is then optimised to work more efficiently, significantly contributing to the bottom line.

Legal Industry

Legal documents have traditionally been signed using wet ink signatures. However, digital signing is fast gaining acceptance as an alternative that verifies signatory identities, is more secure and even tamper-proof. Digital signatures now carry the same significance and weight as wet ink signatures and in most cases, can be considered trustworthy and recognised by law.

There are a few steps to take in ensuring the veracity of digital signatures which are carried out by accredited certification authorities.  Once those steps have been taken, a secure electronic signature can be used on a number of documents to accelerate tedious legal processes and make them more efficient. There is also more transparency as an audit trail is made available to use as forensic evidence.

Government Sectors

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Covid-19 grounded entire nations to a halt. It also forced government sectors to adopt new measures for document management and signing. With people forced to stay home under lockdowns, e-signatures and digital signatures quickly became a norm, accelerating government digitisation in many countries.

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With citizens in most developed countries being comfortable with, and wanting more, digital experiences, governments can cater to their needs by offering digital signatures as a convenient alternative. This means you don’t have to take time off work to go down to a government office just for a routine document signing. It can all be done from the comfort of home or remote locations where identities can be authenticated and signatures, verified and securely captured.

There has never been a better time to switch to digital signing for your business or organisation. Digital signing solutions today are based on advanced technology and are secure, easy, convenient and reliable. This can help streamline work processes to increase efficiency and productivity. With the ubiquity of technology today, identities can be authenticated through sophisticated methods that are painless for the consumer. Legally binding, e-signatures can be adapted for almost any industry, while digital signatures are more suitable for highly regulated industries.

Looking to reduce friction in your organisation’s digital document workflow? Make the switch to digital signing with advanced signature verification and data protection. Get in touch with us via our contact us page to request a demo of our industry solutions.

Electronic signatures or e-signatures are signatures in electronic form which can be used to sign off on documents. More convenient than wet ink signatures, e-signatures allow approvals without the need for paper documents. Today, with the help of e-signature, documents can be signed remotely and instantly, making them highly efficient for businesses. 

Wet signatures are time-consuming and inefficient, and hold up transactions and operations, costing time and money in the long run. The rise of e-commerce and pandemic-induced paradigm shifts in office culture has accelerated the adoption of e-signatures. Growing legal acceptance and regulatory validity of e-signatures have sealed the case for businesses to adopt e-signing solutions.

Adoption of a simple, yet powerful e-signing solution like Dedoco can lead to improved productivity, cost-savings, simplified business operations, all while ensuring strict legal and regulatory compliance.

1.   STREAMLINE OPERATIONS

When running a corporation, big or small, you can agree that there is always a high volume of documentation to handle – like hiring, lease and other legal agreements and contracts, invoices, budget proposals, sales agreements.

Plus, there is usually a signing hierarchy through which the document is handed over, with signers and approvers taking turns to process the document. And if a signer or approver is on leave or out of the country, then delays can extend to days or even weeks!

Dedoco’s signing solutions offer a secure, high-impact, low-maintenance platform to decrease such turnaround times, thereby simplifying company operations. With Dedoco’s products, e-signing can be done in 3 simple steps –

By giving users the freedom to securely sign off on documents anywhere, anytime, and on any device, document processes can be accelerated and operations made more efficient.

2.   COST SAVINGS

A big case for digital transformation has been lowering costs and increasing profits.

Paperless transactions help save on document printing, photocopies, mail deliveries, and courier services. These transactions may seem insignificant, but when multiplied by the number of transactions that happen in a large corporation, build up to significant cost saving over time and positively impact your bottom line.

Dedoco offers cost effective solutions that make document management secure, efficient and economical. Speeding up transaction completions like client acquisition, employee onboarding and legal transactions, streamline operational efficiency and lead to significant cost savings.

3.   ASSURED LEGAL COMPLIANCE

While they have only recently found widespread adoption, e-signatures today are, in fact, more secure than traditional wet-ink signatures and have become legally accepted. It is harder to forge e-signatures as the entire document flow and document signing process is secure and comes with an audit trail.

Regulatory and legal compliance is serious business and we at Dedoco, take compliance seriously. It is the very foundation of our platform, in comparison to other document service providers in the market. We offer:

• A decentralised platform with open architecture to protect data privacy and security
•  Flexibility to leverage your own document repository, enabling complete regulatory compliance
•  Signatures are hashed along with document data, making them tamper-proof
•  Documents are time-stamped on blockchain, providing legally-binding evidence
•  Integrates national and private identity providers, such as Singapore Government SingPass
•  Instantly verify documents and retrieve complete document history to support audits.
•  Authenticate users via email, phone or ID partners

4.   INCREASED DOCUMENT CONTROL

Using wet-ink signatures and physical documents makes it hard to retrieve and review documents and document trails. With an e-signature solution like Dedoco that has versioning features, we empower you to self-serve trust. All document information along with the changes are available to you readily at the click of a button.

With Dedoco, you can even verify your document against your original copy using our advanced hashcheck features to authenticate versions. All this, at the click of a button, without needing to run to your admin everytime you need to audit.

E-Signing solutions like Dedoco empower you to take charge of your documents and document audit trails.

5. ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY

Global warming, climate change and degrading natural environments are on top of mind for not just activists like Greta Thunberg, but for each one of us thriving today in this ecosystem. We must be mindful of the world we are leaving behind for future generations. It is every corporate’s social responsibility to seek and adopt processes that are environment friendly and reduce carbon footprint. E-signature solutions like Dedoco enable corporations to go paperless while executing documents, agreements and contracts. Space-saving is an additional advantage since the documents are no longer stored and organised physically. Adoption of such solutions show your commitment to our society, thereby adding value to your brand!

So what are you waiting for? Are you ready for a digital transformation?

Contact us today to find out more about our suite of products and step into the future of documents!

Written by Dr. Ernie Teo,

Co-Founder, Dedoco, Head of deLab

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Experimentation by enterprises on blockchain technology started as early as 2014 when banks started looking at letters of credit as a use case. The release of the Ethereum Whitepaper in the same year sparked much excitement and signalled the advent of the smart contract era. 

Why Blockchain for Enterprises?

The key characteristics of blockchain which made it attractive to businesses are trust, automation and disintermediation. Current day business processes are clunky and slow as there is a lack of digital trust. Human beings have to get involved to manually verify and enter information. Blockchain, being tamper-proof and transparent, allows the data/information to be shared and trusted among multiple stakeholders. The ability to have a single source of truth across the ecosystem drove many enterprises to look at implementing blockchain.

Enterprises, however, quickly found that they require some level of privacy over the data which permission-less public blockchain technology (during that time) could not provide. They also preferred that the blockchain network not be opened to the public. This led to the evolution in enterprise blockchain technologies such as the Hyperledger family of protocols and Corda. Many use cases have since been deployed and tested on these protocols. Some interesting and notable applications include Food Trust by IBM, Fizzy by AXA and Open Attestation by Govtech Singapore. 

Enterprise blockchain application - Hyperledger Fabric technology & Food Trust

One successful case using permissioned enterprise blockchain technology was Food Trust which utilizes Hyperledger Fabric technology. Food Trust was started in October 2016 as an experiment by IBM and Walmart to track provenance of food products such as mangoes and pork across the food supply chain. It is a supply chain record keeping system designed to improve food safety. The successful trial which led to a production roll out across the industry in 2017. Prominent members of Food Trust includes Carrefour, Nestle and Dole Foods.

Use of Public Blockchain

Not all blockchain use cases for enterprise are built on permissioned blockchain technology. Fizzy by AXA was one example using public blockchain. It was parametric insurance offered by AXA for flight delays. Smart contracts on Ethereum were able to check if flights got delayed and could trigger instant payouts in such events. Unfortunately Fizzy shut down in Nov 2019, it was ahead of its time and the market wasn’t ready. However it demonstrated a very interesting use case on how smart contracts could be utilised for a business using public blockchain technology. 

Public blockchain is also being adopted for certification use cases. Open Attestation is an example, it was first rolled out by Govtech Singapore to educational institutions for the issuance of education certificates (as OpenCerts). When COVID-19 hit, the framework was adapted to be used for PCR tests and vaccination proofs. Open Attestation allows for the verification of any digitally issued certificates and is also being used for trade documentations. Dedoco has also adopted this framework in our dCert product, allowing for our users to easily issue certificates of their own. The use cases for company issued certificates include testimonials, certificates of appreciation, trade documents and even greeting cards.

The blockchain journey for every business is different. Over the years there have been many implementations and use cases. Dedoco was part of a research study by the Blockchain Association Singapore and the University of New South Wales entitled “Mapping the Enterprise Blockchain Landscape - Use Cases across Asia Pacific” (Visit this link to download a copy). The aim of the report is to understand the different approaches business and their service providers take when implementing blockchain. The report included insights from government agencies in Singapore such as Govtech and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, as well as industry players such as One Connect Technology and Accenture. Discovered as part of the study, there are many areas one can explore to get started with Blockchain for their business. However there are many challenges, such as having to work with consortiums and your competitors, finding and paying for talent to build, develop and manage the blockchain solution. Setting up and maintaining your own blockchain solution is hard.

Dedoco & Blockchain for Business 

At Dedoco, we make it simple to connect via our APIs to access blockchain features without having to directly interact with the blockchain. Dedoco stands for decentralised document connector. We aim to connect systems to systems using decentralised trusted documents. Every business deals with documents and has various processes associated with them. One of the biggest challenges for full digitization is a lack of trust between systems. Dedoco can help to change that. You can hash documents, add signatures, approvals and versions to blockchain via Dedoco APIs. To improve the business processes of our users, we have created a suite of products such as digital signing, video signing, certificate issuance and verification. Dedoco aims to help Web2 companies bridge into Web3 through the use of our platform and APIs to issue Web3 documents. 

Dedoco is also designed to protect the privacy of your document. The solution does not store your document, rather it captures its hash such that it can be verifiable at different stages of the document process. With this design you can choose your own deployment model to use our solution, including the option to bring your own document store. 

deLab by Dedoco

We also recognise that there are business use cases for blockchain beyond signing and certification. As such, we created deLab by Dedoco, our research and development branch. At deLab, we are building a set of basic building blocks for blockchain based document processes, we call this the Dedoco Trust Engine. This will be accessible via APIs and can be connected to different blockchain protocols and networks. The building blocks form the foundation for businesses to explore their blockchain use cases and be able to quickly create POCs.

The best use cases and applications come from the actual users of the product. At deLab, our consultants will work with your business to identify key touchpoints which can benefit from blockchain and co-develop solutions with you. 

At Dedoco, we offer an alternative approach to creating business use cases for blockchain. Instead of writing your own custom smart contracts, you can interact with different blockchain functionalities via APIs. We also offer different options for the blockchain network (permissioned or public). This means you don’t need to maintain your own blockchain network or need specialised blockchain developers. 

Dedoco aims to amp up blockchain adoption for real world business use cases and use blockchain to make a positive change for enterprises. Whatever your use case, our set of solutions are created to help you realise your blockchain vision. If you have standard business processes you want to digitise, you can use Dedoco’s SaaS platform or its APIs. If you like to build your own blockchain based applications and customise your own processes, you can use Dedoco Trust Engine.

If you are interested in Dedoco solutions or delab services, you can contact us here.

"They are a surprising innovator, recognizing the value of blockchain and document management combined. We have long advocated for the use of blockchain for documents, and they have the potential to set that ball rolling. Surprisingly, few, if any, have done this before, and surprising in that they are already, despite being an early-stage startup seeing notable success." 2 August 2022, Deep Analysis Analyst Team, 5 New Reports Available.

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Dedoco caught the attention of Deep Analysis this past quarter and has been featured and published in an independent vendor-specific report. Read all about it below.

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Original article: https://www.deep-analysis.net/vendor-vignette/dedoco/

Web3 has been touted as the next internet revolution. It will empower end-users, allowing them to use, trade and share digital assets and information in a decentralised manner. It will enable true peer to peer interactions on the internet, without the need for any central authorities. As such, many term Web3 as the “personal” internet. 

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To Dedoco, Web3 means ownership. Ownership of your own documents and information which can be shared in a trusted and verifiable manner. Decentralisation is at the heart of this, with the trust that comes with proper processes recorded on blockchain, one doesn’t need to refer to a central authority for the source of truth. This combined with tokenization and smart contracts, allows us to truly ‘own’ our documents and digital assets.

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Web3 applications began to realise their full potential with the rise of DeFi and NFTs. Users can bring their digital assets and wallet with them from application to application and this comes with connectivity to other decentralised applications such as cryptocurrency swaps, naming services, identity management and storage. Use cases for Web3 extends to DAOs (decentralised autonomous organisations) where token holders can vote on various decisions much like a company board and Metaverse applications as the industry looks to making virtual assets more portable between digital realms. Of course Web3 has many interesting implications for the financial industry and we saw evidence of that at Singapore Fintech Festival 2021 where the entire conference theme was centred around Web3.

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The Web3 technology stack consists of several layers ranging from protocol to front end applications. Inbetween, infrastructure plays an important role. The infrastructure layer is where the different tools or “lego blocks” lie for one to be able to build their own decentralised applications. This covers transactional tools like Uniswap, decentralised storage like IPFS and identity management tools like ENS.

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For Web3 to be able to change the fundamentals of how we work, one missing category in the infrastructure layer we foresee is a set of business process and documentation tools. Every business deals with documents, be it contracts, agreements or other documentations like purchase orders and invoices. These documents need to be issued, approved or acknowledged by various parties. In general such documents are not trusted between entities and systems, manual verification processes are needed when a document passes from one system to another. Web3 can potentially change this with non-fungible document processes (NFDs). 

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A NFD would provide provenance on the document and its business process by tracking the following:

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With these features the NFD can be trusted and verifiable digitally. This can bring about new paradigms to digital transformation and new ways to connect with customers. For example, businesses can share information and documentation by bringing their own trusted documents. This gives more power to the document owners and also enhances the competitive environment.

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The next step to the Web3 industrial revolution is to bridge companies from Web2. As companies transition from centralised systems, they would need to:

As we transition towards a “personal” internet that is more connected and technologies like AI, ML, AR and VR continue to change the world that we live in. It is important to consider Web3 as part of any company’s digital transformation process.

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At Dedoco, we are connecting systems using our DEcentralised DOcument COnnectors. As a document goes through a signing process via the Dedoco platform (with full digital signing features), NFD Processes are generated. Making the documents tamper-proof, verifiable and trusted. Dedoco also provides APIs to connect between systems, allowing one to integrate from Web2 to Web3. To find out more, contact us and request for a demo.

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This material was first presented during Singapore Blockchain Week 2022, organised by Blockchain Association Singapore (BAS).

Watch the Keynote session here

Original article link

👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I am the CEO of Dedoco. We are a digital Document Management as a Service (DMaaS), providing next-gen privacy protection and document security to businesses.

🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I am risk-averse and have not tried many foods.

For one, I have never tasted an M&Ms before and still wouldn't try.

🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Creating and growing Dedoco.

For the immense belief in our vision and how we are going to change the future of technology.

🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?

Enterprise Web3.

Watch us (Dedoco) in this space!

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

You can ask for advice, but it's equally or sometimes even more important to listen to your gut.

🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Work.

🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Current fave: You (on Netflix)

🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?

Dark Belgian chocolate