Pawnee Leasing Customers Access Capital 50% Faster with DocuSign eSignature

Known for their ‘can do’ attitude and creative leasing and financing solutions, Pawnee Leasing Corporation is dedicated to providing companies in any industry—from healthcare to construction—with affordable equipment leases through its network of independent brokers and originators. Managing these transactions between customers, third-party brokers and Pawnee Leasing’s staff is the core of Pawnee’s business—but they were complex and inefficient due to the company’s manual, paper-based processes.

Leasing agreements would arrive from brokers filled with errors, causing a lot of back-and-forth between Pawnee Leasing’s staff and its customers. It took days or even weeks to complete agreements and made documents difficult to track, which created delays in funding and slowed the efficiency of Pawnee Leasing’s business. 

The company needed a solution that would eliminate the errors and bottlenecks in its agreement processes. By choosing DocuSign eSignature and DocuSign Knowledge-Based Authentication (KBA), an enhanced identification offering, and integrating them with eOriginal’s eAsset management platform, Pawnee digitized the process and made it more secure. The result was a more efficient leasing and loans process which ultimately gave customers faster access to capital.

Faster leasing agreements with DocuSign Agreement Cloud

Prior to implementing DocuSign, Pawnee Leasing’s staff would receive scanned copies of new leasing agreements from third-party brokers only to find errors throughout, like pages left unsigned or incorrect dollar amounts. As a result, staff members had to send an addendum to customers, and the customer would then have to send back an updated copy of the agreement. But because there wasn’t a clear and standardized process, customers would frequently become confused and send back the documents to the third-party broker rather than Pawnee Leasing. 

 With DocuSign eSignature powering its agreements—which was integrated with the company’s eOriginal eAsset Management platform—Pawnee Leasing created a consistent process for all of its leasing contracts. Today, with eSignature, customers and brokers can’t finalize a document until all fields have been signed and completed. According to Schonfeld, not only did DocuSign eSignature speed up the document completion process by an estimated 24 to 48 hours, it also gave Pawnee Leasing a business advantage. 

“DocuSign’s ease of use was a huge value-add for Pawnee, because it positioned us as a company that brokers can partner with. Now, brokers don’t need to hassle their customers to FedEx documents to us. They can just sign, click a button, and boom, it’s done,” said Brian Schonfeld, the manager of business intelligence and analytics at Pawnee Leasing and one of the leading forces behind the implementation of DocuSign eSignature and eOriginal’s eAsset Management Platform.  

Pawnee Leasing integrated DocuSign eSignature into eOriginal’s eAsset Management platform to ensure that all of its now digital documents could be securely stored and managed. With the eAsset Management platform’s intelligent routing capabilities, the company and its lenders can track agreements in real-time and receive automated notifications on the status of any document as they are being edited or completed. Pawnee Leasing can also give different end users, like third-party brokers or legal counsel, secure access to leasing agreements in the eOriginal platform, thereby improving visibility over transactions enterprise-wide.

Secure leasing agreements with DocuSign Identify 

Because Pawnee Leasing’s business involves customers’ financial information, the company has to be especially sensitive to fraudulent behavior. To retain the confidence of its customers and brokers, Pawnee Leasing must provide high levels of security for all agreements. 

Pawnee Leasing implemented KBA, a DocuSign Identify solution, to reduce the risk of fraudulent behavior during the agreement process. DocuSign Identify and eOriginal also guarantee that every digital document is as legally enforceable as paper contracts by creating a “digital original.” For example, before gaining access to a document, DocuSign Identify asks users to answer specific verification questions. For example, before gaining access to a document, signers are asked to answer challenge questions sourced from commercially available public and private databases.

Implementing DocuSign eSignature and KBA and integrating it with the eOriginal platform has been a massive step forward in Pawnee Leasing’s journey toward a company-wide digital transformation. Schonfeld and his team are always looking for new places to modernize the business. “Thanks to DocuSign, there’s much more customer loyalty than there was before adoption,” Schonfeld says. “We’re certainly moving more toward a fully digitized, more paperless company.”