In an interview with TechGraph, Krupesh Bhat, Founder of SignDesk, discusses how their document automation platform is disrupting the e-signature market by offering comprehensive document generation, collaboration, and verification capabilities, attracting clients beyond e-signatures alone.
Read the complete interview:
TechGraph: How does SignDesk differentiate itself from other e-signature solution providers in the market, and what unique features or capabilities does your platform offer to meet your customers’ diverse needs?
Krupesh Bhat: While we’re known for our E-Signature and digital stamping solutions, it’s the capabilities of our document automation platform that sets us apart from anyone else in the game. Clients come on board for the e-signatures and stay for the end-to-end digital documentation. Once on our platform, clients can create templates & use content libraries to scale up document generation, collaborate on documents online, negotiate contracts, store documents, track process status, verify various types of photo IDs, and of course electronically sign and stamp documents.
Consolidating different functionalities into one neat package has allowed us to widen the scope of our product, build more use cases, and upsell to onboarded clients.
However, our E-Signatures themselves can hold their own in the market – our signature workflows are scalable to accommodate growth in operations, we offer group signatures & video signatures for low-tech environments, and we’ve fully embraced the low-code mantra with custom building blocks for users to create their workflows. Our customers need robust & scalable workflows to experience the full benefits of digital transformation, and with SignDesk this is exactly what they’re getting.
TechGraph: Can you elaborate on the industries or sectors where SignDesk’s e-signature solutions have been particularly successful, and what strategies have you employed to penetrate and cater to those specific markets?
Krupesh Bhat: Our initial target segment was the BFSI sector, as it’s heavily regulated and non-compliance is a serious business risk. We’ve seen a lot of success with banks, NBFCs, AMCs, and insurers; but this was expected as we were among the first on the scene & could build trust rapidly.
The best strategy to beat the competition when catering to BFSI is to showcase the reliability of your product and focus on the results you can generate for your clients, this came through for us. Apart from this segment, we’ve also seen a lot of success with FMCG & retail.
We attribute this to the efficiency factor – we’ve built our solutions to not only enhance compliance but also boost productivity for processes like documentation, ID verification, contract management, negotiations, etc. This comes in handy for retailers who need to manage complex supply chains & keep track of lots of vendors and contractors.
TechGraph: In an increasingly competitive e-signature market, how does SignDesk ensure the security and reliability of its platform, and what steps do you take to maintain customer trust and data privacy?
Krupesh Bhat: Data security has indeed emerged as a key differentiating factor in SaaS, especially fintech & RegTech. Both consumers & companies now expect strong privacy safeguards when doing business. SignDesk has always prioritized the notion of digital trust by adhering to the most comprehensive data privacy protocols.
We’re among the only companies in the compliance space to achieve enhanced GDPR compliance. Recently, we’ve complied with over 10 international certifications for information & cyber security. These include ISO, CCPA, FERPA, Graham-Leach-Billey, and NIST.
We have the protocols and posture in place to safeguard financial data, health information, personally identifiable information, educational information & all types of sensitive data.
TechGraph: Could you share any insights into the challenges or obstacles SignDesk has faced during its journey, and how you have overcome them to achieve your current market position?
Krupesh Bhat: The technology we build is pretty reliant on the word of the law. Our E-Signature & KYC solutions need to function as prescribed by regulation, but the latter is frequently subject to change. These sorts of shifts in the legal landscape have often left us at sea, an example would be when Aadhaar was declared invalid for use by private sector banks about half a decade ago.
However, SignDesk could fall back on the revenue generated by our other solutions to tide things over. It’s also important to look for opportunities while facing such challenges, for us this took the form of figuring out what else in documentation we could automate. We eventually landed on Nach-based payments, and now our eNach solution is among our biggest earners.
TechGraph: As technology and customer expectations evolve, what are the upcoming trends or developments in the e-signature industry that SignDesk is closely monitoring or actively working on to stay ahead of the curve?
Krupesh Bhat: A good rule of thumb to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to digitization is to focus on what’s convenient. The industry is always trying to build features & use cases that make getting things done easier. Presently it’s all about creating an intuitive and seamless experience for users (i.e. signers). E-Signatures for mobile devices are big right now and we’re building features to make things more user-friendly like drag-and-drop functions, no-code and low-code orchestration, ecosystem integrations, and more.
Users are looking for new forms of authentication, biometrics are especially popular. We’re also building new forms of authentication to anticipate user needs.
Additionally, we’re focused on low-tech use cases, with an eye on rural and semi-urban environments. For this, we’ve built video signatures, where Text-to-Speech capabilities are used to read out contract clauses to signers in vernacular languages, and a video of the signer providing verbal consent is recorded as the signature.
TechGraph: Could you discuss any plans for expansion or partnerships that SignDesk has in the pipeline, both domestically and internationally, to further strengthen its presence and reach a wider customer base?
Krupesh Bhat: We’ve won a few big partnerships in the USA and UAE, and we’ll be looking to strengthen these and expand our presence in those markets. Recently we’ve also partnered with Microsoft to provide cloud-based E-Signatures, contract management & ID verification; we expect this to bring in a lot of prospects, too.
