This startup wants businesses to go paperless to get ready for ‘Digital India’

India’s prime minister Narendra Modi recently outlined how he wants to reduce paperwork to a minimum as part of his vision for the future, dubbed ‘Digital India’. Modi wants more paperwork to be done online and for government services to be available on mobile devices.

It’s not just about government offices. There are thousands of small, medium, and large businesses in India that deal with paper each day. If all these go paperless or even reduce their usage, imagine the amount of money, time, and paper saved.

Sunil Patro, the founder and CEO of SignEasy, promotes a similar vision about going paperless. He conceptualized the company in 2009 after the exhausting experience of signing and faxing back an offer letter while he was on a vacation in Mexico.

SignEasy’s mobile app allows for the signing of documents electronically from a phone or a tablet based on iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Kindle Fire platforms. It integrates with Box, Dropbox, Evernote, and Google Drive.

SignEasy competes with US-based DocuSign that provides electronic signature technology with digital transaction management services. San Francisco-based Hellosign offers an electronic signature infrastructure for the web. Besides these two, there are number of services focused on electronic signatures out in the market.

From a two-man team

Patro bootstrapped his company to work on SignEasy app with a two-people team in late 2009 and now has 12 team members onboard in Bengaluru.

To use the app, one needs to create an account. Then the app can capture the signatures fed through fingertip input or a stylus. Those signatures can be placed inside a document, depicting the intent to sign it. One can add other details such as name and date along with it. A digital audit trail is initiated by sharing a log with details about the digital fingerprint of the document along with the signer’s email, time of signing, and the IP address of the user.

The company continues to add meaningful features to the mobile app. For instance, the app can allow up to three people to sign a document and close a deal on the spot. Recently, the company integrated Apple’s fingerprint recognition system, Touch ID, for the iOS version of the SignEasy app as an authentication layer for additional security. The app offers a four-digit passcode to authenticate the user signature.

The app offers a nifty feature called Continuity which allows easy cross-device portability to finish off the pending digital paperwork easily. So if you left off signing something on your iPad, you can complete that on your Android-based phone at home. It’s helpful for people who work across multiple devices.

While the app is free for download, it includes in-app purchases to use the service. Average users can opt for a basic plan costing US$5 (INR300) per year to sign ten documents, while businesses can pay US$60 (INR3,600) per person annually for signing an unlimited number of documents. The startup has attracted over 4,000 paying customers every month – not just in India, but around the world.

Lack of awareness

People often refer to electronic signatures as digital signatures. You must have used a digital pen to sign forms at the Indian Regional Transport Offices for getting a driving license issued. While both are used interchangeably, they are different from one another.

Electronic signature is used by a person with the intent of accepting the contents of the digitally transmitted message and authenticating it with his or her own unique signature as an electronic image. It is like your personal, stylized electronic seal acting as the proof of consent.

On the other hand, digital signatures involve usage of public-key infrastructure cryptography mechanisms combining three different algorithms – key generation, signing, and signature verification. When one signs a document using a digital signature and sends it across, a verification of authenticity takes place at the recipient’s end.