Despite the fact that electronic signatures have been around for some time, the lack of clarity in the law resulted in discouraging some investment firms from implementing them and significantly improve their subscription process.
Now, when the regulatory bodies are on side, the question is what tools and technologies are available on the market to get started with electronic signatures?
From a tech perspective it is important to look at the components of the solution that you need to bring in.
eSignature Execution
The first component that comes to mind is how to sign documents. The focus should be choosing the platform which is wide known, tried and tested across different industries – DocuSign, Adobe Sign and there are few others which are well known and trusted.
The key to selecting a platform is to understand the underlying technology that is used to prove the identity of the signature. Therefore, a lot of these will be components like tracking the location of the signer, the IP, the access to the email and using that to digitally enhance the proof that the actual person is signing the document.
Sub doc workflow management
The second tier is about making the process more efficient and looking at using client data in a way that pre-populates all the documents. That should be done in a way it drives all the rules around subscription documents so that they can’t be submitted without being entirely complete. It should integrate with whichever system you’re choosing for the electronic signatures.
CRM & MIS
And lastly, extremely important component is utilising data because of so called “efficiency battle of tomorrow”. Fund managers have to find the way to leverage and mobilise all of the meta-data from the documents into systems like CRM and management information systems. That way they are able to see the actual leads that are coming in, the characteristics of the clients that are subscribing to dealer networks to bring capital, using that to empower their sales process.
SmartDocs: Combining the best-in-breed technologies to create the best value
The components incorporated in SmartDocs are: DocuSign for the e-signatures, CRM and MIS and the KYC passport. CRM and MIS components are agnostic, so you can use an Obsidian Finance CRM, or any other system.
The idea behind this technology is to make sure that meta-data, such as passport identification, birthdays, the maturity of the investment or anything that is relevant form the sales perspective and KYC is available to systems that use it.
Lastly the additional connection is the “KYC passport”. The key is that if you have 15 different versions of sub docs, the KYC passport or digital representation of the client data should just simply pre-populate all of them even though they are in different formats, because at the end of the day the fields are often times reused across documents and just appear in different places. So the goal of that is to make the life of the advisor and the investor as easy as possible and to keep it as streamlined as possible.
