In an increasingly fast-paced and demanding society, adapting everyday processes has become essential. By adapting, we mean optimizing. All sectors share a common point: the need to sign documents as an administrative formality.
Whether it’s employment contracts, service agreements, insurance documentation, or real estate transactions, the examples are numerous and varied. Here’s a closer look at electronic signatures and their everyday applications.
What is an electronic signature?
An electronic signature, also known as a digital signature, represents a dematerialized certificate of authenticity. It establishes a secure digital link between the identity of a signer, their digital signature, and a specific document.
By encrypting the data to ensure complete confidentiality, the risk of information leakage or falsification is minimized. Key advantages include the ability to sign a document without time or geographic constraints, the entirely digital nature of document consultation, signing, and downloading, and the speed of the online signing process compared to traditional physical signatures.
Legal documents: an essential use
Legal professions are numerous and have always been a cornerstone of economic functioning. Lawyers, notaries, legal advisors, and bailiffs are professions that require the production of many documents, contracts, and acts.
Common documents in this sector requiring signatures include minutes of meetings, company statutes, authentic acts, and contracts related to business sales. Electronic signatures allow these legal formalities to be completed in record time while ensuring the confidentiality of exchanged information, a critical factor in the legal field.
Another important aspect is protection against fraudulent modification and falsification. Besides speeding up legal processes, electronic signatures help prevent falsifications that could have serious legal repercussions. Additionally, document modifications and revisions are common in the legal profession, and a dematerialized validation process allows authentication of changes with just a few clicks.
Commercial sector: abundance of contracts and client agreements
Another sector particularly burdened with paperwork is commerce—whether in physical stores, e-commerce, or marketplaces, and involving client relations, supplier links, and more.
This sector inevitably involves a large number of sales contracts, client agreements, supplier contracts, and terms and conditions. Many businesses handle hundreds of contracts monthly, making the task particularly time-consuming and costly without electronic signatures.
Thus, using electronic signatures instead of traditional signing meetings is essential. The time and financial investment saved through electronic signatures allow businesses to focus on sales and client relations, positively impacting their revenue.
Real estate transactions and various agreements
The real estate sector is marked by numerous administrative formalities, including property sales and purchases, rentals, agency relations, negotiations, and promises of sale.
What sets the real estate sector apart is that many actors (seller, buyer, real estate agency, notary) participate in the same process. This can lead to extended delays due to the multiple signatures required from various signatories with varying availability. Electronic signatures address this by simplifying the succession of actors and streamlining the tracking of signatures and document groupings, which are now fully manageable online with secure, encrypted access.
Human resources: Employment contracts and confidentiality agreements
The HR world is no exception. Managing human resources is complex, especially due to the large number of signatures needed throughout the year. Employee contracts, apprentice agreements, temporary worker contracts, confidentiality agreements, and corporate health insurance enrollment—all require multiple signatures.
Managing each staff member and team already takes considerable time. Assigning signature processes to electronic signature systems allows HR departments to save significant time, receive quicker formal responses from employees, and maintain a comprehensive overview of their workforce and contract types.
Banking formalities and SEPA direct debit mandates
The final sector where electronic signatures are widely used is banking. Each bank advisor manages numerous client accounts, not to mention the various administrative and financial procedures requiring signatures.
Most banks now have their own electronic signature software to simplify the signing of important document flows and ensure better management. Common banking operations include signing SEPA direct debit mandates for various creditors, opening and closing bank accounts, concluding loans, and validating terms and conditions.
