SignNow: Authenticating Digital Processes

Ken Grohe, President

With enterprises turning digital, “paperless” workplaces have long since become the norm. However, this trend increased the vulnerability of businesses and paved the way for security threats such as fraud and data breaches. To ensure that their customer-facing digital channels have adequate security features built in, organizations are eager to adopt advanced authentication options to help validate the identity of participants in any digital environment. One of the prerequisites for this hassle-free environment is electronic signatures, or e-signatures, which help them ensure processes are safe and secure.

Ken Grohe, the president of SignNow discusses his company’s unique stand in the digital market and their ability to tackle multiple issues through their portfolio of e-signature solutions, which aims to provide a quality service designed for optimal user interaction.

Shed some light behind the conception of the company and the journey so far

SignNow started in 2011 and was initially founded to disrupt the notarization marketplace. After the first year, we decided that the market for disrupting notarization wasn’t as big as it was for our e-signature platform. Banking on the success of our e-signature product which is a necessary delivery mechanism for notarization, we built the entire e-signature functionality on an API. We built the entire process to be initiated in a mobile environment such as a computer, desktop, tablet, or a mobile phone.

In your interactions with CIOs of leading companies, what sense do you get of the challenges they face and how is SignNow effectively addressing these issues?

We cater across the entire value-chain, law firms, healthcare, commercial real estates, construction companies as well as legal departments of an organization. The biggest challenge we had at the beginning was when enterprises asked if the e-signature was legal and compliant and safe. Every day we answer these queries effectively through our offerings. Yes, it is legal; in 2000 it was incorporated in the E-SIGN Act, and we are one of the only three e-signature vendors that comply with the act, which guarantees its legality. As for being compliant, we are GDPR, PCI DSS, and SOC 2 Type II.

We also ensure our processes that cater to the healthcare business HIPAA complaint. Our clients have a full honest audit trail, every step of the way. Additionally, we have dual authentication, and validation of MAC address, IP address and others, that are fully admissible in the court of law.

Our clients have a full, legally admissible audit trail, every step of the way

Additionally, to make sure our solution is safe, we continue to add more services. Since April 2017, every single issue, every single license of SignNow includes advanced threat protection (ATP), which is a small microservice and takes 70 microseconds to complete. The good news is you know with 100 percent certainty that any document you put in this site now and send out to sign is clean. There is no malicious link, no type of squatting, no spoofing enactors, no malicious intent, and no java scripts that could breach the environment.

Could you elaborate on your solution offerings, how is it integrated with the NetSuite platform and the benefits it provides?

We are natively integrated into NetSuite, and they are one of our longest partners. Our app is now available in the Suite app where we offer something very unique called in-person signing. Many of the customers who buy NetSuite have field services. Take, for instance, a fencing company that has a customer who wants to install fences; when service people complete that installation, they create a final bill that needs authorization from the customer at the job sight. The customer can sign to authorize the bill with in-person signing, thus, confirming that their expectation with the fence is satisfactory. That signing may be done on the iPad in offline mode or online mode. The bill authorization triggers a billing event or completion of the entire process, which is very important in the NetSuite accounting system. Every company that has a business process includes some kind of delivery and confirmation of the delivery; with NetSuite integrated with SignNow, they can save nearly a week of billing every single time and get better user experience.

A client case study for the reader’s benefit

One of our biggest customers is Xerox; they use SignNow inside of NetSuite and are very happy with the product. Their Salesforce personnel meets with customers at their locations, and when one of their devices is under repair or when one of their customers wants to buy a new device or change their device or renew a lease, they can do that on a mobile device on the field now.

Differentiating Factors

We are the most secure e-signature platform provider as we have an Advanced Threat Protection built in. Since our app is based on an API, every time we make changes to the system, our customers it gets reflected for our customers remotely. We offer pricing flexibility, where businesses may choose from buying it per-user or per-API, and we are very affordable for both.

The future of the company

I think today we are winning businesses with SignNow, and near term, we are taking our sister company, PDFfiller and combining features of both the products. The one-size-fits-all solution can compose and edit documents, have them signed, and store and retrieve them, all in one place. I do think we will be the company that will create ripples in the workflow markets in the near future.