Digitizing Agreements in Financial Services

Tricia Griffith, CEO, Progressive Insurance, fell in love with DocuSign eSignature when it enabled her to buy a house from the comfort of her couch. She recognized the potential eSignature had to speed up business and elevate customer experience.

At Progressive, eSignature is embedded into Progressive’s web and mobile-app experiences: “We are in the business of trust, we have so many transactions that it’s really mission-critical, and it’s expected from our customers.” Like most financial services organization leaders, Griffith realizes that ease of use and digitization brings efficiencies and business growth. 

With our customers' priorities in mind, we’re building innovative products and features to further the goal of end-to-end digital agreements. Here are a few examples of innovation we featured at this year's Momentum, our annual conference.

Remote customers, remote employees, digital agreements

DocuSign CEO Dan Springer and COO Scott Olrich recently shared their views on the ‘anywhere economy’ - the increasing expectation of consumers to have anything, anytime, anywhere, all enabled by the Internet. The need for remote business is not going to go away anytime soon. Banks and financial institutions are seeing that digital agreements not only satisfy customer expectations but actually result in cost efficiencies and happier employees. Here are a few examples of how we’ve seen banking leaders expand their usage of the Agreement Cloud:

• Modernizing remote employee communication using bulk send 
• Faster loan processing using digital ID verification and eSignature 
• Streamlining digital account opening with digital ID verification and Guided forms by Smart IQ
• Enhancing customer experience through responsive signing and SMS delivery

We’ve also transformed the paper-based notarization process into a fully digital experience. At Momentum, we introduced DocuSign Notary, the trusted way to remotely and electronically notarize agreements. It gives your notaries public the tools they need to securely conduct remote online notarization (RON) transactions via an encrypted audio-visual session. Whether you are finalizing total loss claims or obtaining spousal consent, with DocuSign Notary you can:

• Provide a convenient experience for your signers, as they can now remotely sign and notarize agreements. This saves them the time and logistical hassles of meeting a notary public in person. 
• Mitigate risk with a robust audit trail with a tamper-evident Certificate of Completion, audio-visual recording and electronic journal.
• Have greater confidence in your signers’ identities with secure identity verification and knowledge-based authentication technologies.

Please note this initial release of DocuSign Notary is available to US-based customers who either employ or contract notaries public seated in supported states. Over time, Notary will also be able to support organizations who don’t supply their own notaries public.

AI and workflow automation 

As more workflows evolve to include electronic signatures, digital agreements are also becoming more complex. In banking, agreements often require comprehensive review, leading to inefficiencies and delays. Contract lifecycle management tools like DocuSign CLM allow multiple parties to collaborate and edit the agreement regardless of location, adding an extra layer of accuracy and efficiency to the agreement lifecycle. 

At Momentum, we shared how CLM can act as a central repository for key contracts. Contracts are fundamental for banks to manage risk and meet financial regulations. Without central, searchable repositories, banks have struggled to cope with regulations like the LIBOR transition that require all legacy contracts to be revised per new rate standards. Banks see the need to digitally search contracts, assess risk and replace terms rather than spend heavily on employee hours to manually comb through contracts.

Security, monitoring and insights

Thanks to innovations in AI and machine learning, banks and financial firms are looking to leverage AI-powered search tools that; allow banking professionals to extract specific terms and information from documents. Enhanced reporting can help employees analyze agreement completions and proactively detect trends or risks. Indeed, per research by Deloitte, security and data analytics are likely to grow as investment areas for banks and insurance companies as more transactions move online. 

Here are a few examples of new tools we have launched at Momentum 2021:

• Signing Insights is a data visualization tool that helps your admins better understand signer behavior to turn data into action. For example, an admin can see that a certain template’s signers have an unusually high drop-off rate. The admin can then focus on improving the template’s usability to increase completion rates.  
• DocuSign Data Verification, an eSignature add-on, is a solution designed to provide account validation required under the new NACHA Web Debit rule, in real-time. Our solution helps you comply with NACHA’s new Web Debit Account Validation Rule and offers pre-built integrations with preferred partners Plaid and GIACT, as well as ways to connect with other NACHA vendors, so you can perform validation during the signing session. 
• DocuSign Monitor provides visibility into your operations as they relate to your DocuSign agreements and processes. Using advanced analytics to track eSignature web, mobile and API account activity across the enterprise, Monitor empowers security teams to:

• Detect potential threats from outsiders or insiders, with rules-based alerts 
• Investigate incidents, with actionable information about the activity that caused the alert
• Respond to verified threats with decisive action, like closing a potentially-compromised account

If you missed Momentum, check out the recordings here to learn how we can help you maximize your investment and adopt new innovations.