Capturing Consent for Consumer Financing and Leasing Applications

On the surface, the “I agree” button on clickwrap agreements seems pretty straightforward--all customers need to do is click a button or check a box to express their consent. For organizations, however, managing these standard, non-negotiable, and often high-volume agreements can be quite complex. In fact, organizations who don’t have the proper clickwrap processes and solutions in place can open themselves up to legal risk, such as class action lawsuits or loss of intellectual property.

This is increasingly important as more and more customers engage with your business online - it’s vital to capture and document consent to your terms-and-conditions, privacy policy, terms-of-use, and more to protect your business. That’s why our customers, such as American First Finance, are using the DocuSign Agreement Cloud to modernize their agreement processes, enhance their customer experience, and mitigate legal risk.

Digitizing agreements at American First Finance

American First Finance Inc. is a consumer financial services company with a unique business model, entering into consumer rental purchase agreements, purchasing retail installment sale contracts, and servicing loans originated by a third-party bank. Over the past few years, American First Finance has been rapidly growing and expanding their sales teams; thus, investing in their infrastructure to scale and support growth has been a key company initiative. The legal and IT teams recognized the importance of leveraging new technology to improve customer experiences and streamline internal processes. They traditionally had manual processes when it came to creating, reviewing and negotiating agreements but have taken strides in digitizing and automating their business processes with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.

A new solution for clickwrap agreements

DocuSign Click was a natural next step in their Agreement Cloud journey. American First Finance was previously using a proprietary clickwrap solution to capture customer consent to their standard terms and DocuSign eSignature for consumer contracts. When the legal and IT teams saw that DocuSign was offering a new clickwrap solution, they were interested to see how DocuSign could help them manage version control and document evidence of consent of their clickwrap agreements. DocuSign Click is an easy-to-use, simple-to-deploy clickwrap solution, helping organizations securely capture customer consent to standard terms. With DocuSign Click, American First Finance has visibility into a detailed audit trail. The company can easily version their agreements, set up deployment using Click’s automatically generated code snippet and ensure customers have consented to the latest updates.

Leveraging the DocuSign Agreement Cloud

For American First Finance, Click is ideal for consumer financing and leasing applications, and eSignature and the eSignature API will continue to be used for agreements with dynamic fields. Customers can apply for these applications via an electronic application on desktop, mobile and in authorized merchant’s retail locations. As part of the application, customers would need to agree to American First Finance’s standard Application Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy and Arbitration Agreement using DocuSign Click. The customer’s identity is then authenticated, and if the application is approved, American First Finance will send a contract with the terms of the agreement using DocuSign eSignature. And finally, it uses the eSignature API to return signing events back to their systems. For American First Finance, the DocuSign Agreement Cloud is helping accelerate the speed of business, minimize legal risk, and improve the customer experience.

Best practices from American First Finance

The legal team at American First Finance offers these tips in implementing a new solution for clickwrap agreements:

• Ensure you have the underlying clickwrap agreements saved in an editable format and in a location your legal team can easily access to manage version control.
• Mock-up how you want the clickwrap to be presented to your end-users so your team has a clear picture of how it should be designed.
• Think outside the box to identify clickwrap use cases (i.e. consent-based agreements without dynamic fields such as terms-of-service, end-user license agreements, marketing communications consent and more).

To hear more about American First Finance’s Agreement Cloud journey, and see a live demo of DocuSign Click, view our on-demand webinar Capture Customer Consent Online with a Single Click.

by Mindy Park, Product Marketing Manager at DocuSign.