Achieving Process Compliance with Secured Signing

Secured Signing customers across a range of industries have been able to wipe out the costs and time lost to manually recording compliance with their consumer protection obligations.  Implementing a tailored signing workflow allows them to demonstrate process based compliance.

Consumer protection is a good thing. When we are buying something it is great to know that there are rules to make sure we get a fair deal. One form of consumer protection is making sure the purchaser is aware of their rights. Someone buying something or signing up to an agreement may also have a cooling off period in which they can cancel the transaction without penalty.

For businesses, complying with these consumer protections can be costly and time consuming.  They key thing is being able to demonstrate that the customer was made aware of their rights, or provided the required documentation or that the transaction was not processed until after the cooling off period. The traditional approach has been to have checklists or acknowledgements that the customer needed to sign. For cooling off periods, a manual process to log dates and times and set reminders to proceed to the next step are required. All of these manual, often paper based processes waste staff time and create risk if they are not diligently followed.

Moving to what I call process based compliance can remove this costly overhead from your business. Some examples will help explain.

For customers in the financial services industry, Secured Signing have delivered tailored signing workflows that display all declarations required by their legislation. Before the customer can sign the document, they must first acknowledge these notifications. Having this process based compliance makes it easy for these companies to demonstrate that the customer simply cannot have signed the agreement without being advised of their rights.

Automated cooling off periods have been included in the online enrolment solutions Secured Signing has delivered for the education industry. On completing the application form, a letter of offer is automatically generated, immediately signed by the applicant and their details written directly to the student management system. The workflow then waits the mandated 48 hours before inviting the student to complete the loan application. The time stamp of the digital signature in the letter of offer will always be at least 48 hours earlier than the time stamp of the digital signature in the loan application form.

Both these examples demonstrate how having compliance requirements built into your signing workflow and enforced by Secured Signing, delivers a process based compliance that is automated, highly reliable and avoids wasting staff and customer time. With the increasing regulation applicable to all industries, the wasted effort and cost in traditional approaches to demonstrating compliance will continue to rise. Now is the time to make the change to online signing with compliance baked into the process.

Contact us to find out more about a process compliance solution specific to your needs.

Till next time

Cheers, John