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These projects never realize that eSign tech is a commodity, the actual business you are in is creating market level Trust for your platform. Eg if you’re a CF

These projects never realize that eSign tech is a commodity, the actual business you are in is creating market level Trust for your platform. Eg if you’re a CFO, would you being willing to take the risk just to save a couple of bucks on a no-name eSign service for all your sensitive legal & vendor agreements, or use the worldwide Trusted eSign platform of DocuSign - which has gained acceptance by regulators as being an authoritative legal signature of contracts.

grokgrok 3y ago
If your company has a board and a CFO then sure, go with the trusted solution. If you're starting a scrappy, modern, real world business, things like this can help avoid death by a thousand cuts that is paid microservices.
FpUser 3y ago
>"Eg if you’re a CFO, would you being willing to take the risk just to save a couple of bucks " Typical FUD preached by many online companies to lure customers. Even verbal contracts are enforceable (with the caveats of course). These will be fine for the most boring cases. The others are signed with lawyers anyways.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  "take the risk" This is the important part you're ignoring. Yes, verbal contracts between businesses are binding, but only to the extent you can actually prove the terms in a court of law. Using DocuSign (or similar) is about risk mitigation, specifically about being able to prove the the contents of the contract in legal proceedings. The risk with being a business that allows for verbal contracts is that one of your vendors may be unscrupulous and truly screw you over. And that's a matter of when, not if.
  - FpUser 3y ago
    You are suddenly switching from Ducusign vs Docuseal to DocuSign vs verbal. That was not point of my reply.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    I've never understood how DocuSign mitigates the risk any more than both parties signing a PDF in Preview (or similar) and exchanging via email. Doesn't the email part validate that you are the person signing the document?
    - somery 3y ago
      I think that's a valid point - and actually in their terms of services say that they are not responsible for the signer authenticity. Here is a summary from their TOS: "DocuSign provides tools and features that help to establish the authenticity of a signer, such as email verification, access code, SMS verification, phone verification, and knowledge-based authentication. However, it's important to note that while these tools can enhance the security and authenticity of the signing process, DocuSign itself does not guarantee the authenticity of the signers. The responsibility of ensuring the identity of the other party lies with the user"
guideamigo 3y ago
You are right. Alternative to eSign is to just send PDF documents. And as the person to add their signature to it.
bob1029 3y ago
> eSign tech is a commodity We learned this pretty quickly with our banking products. Having your own bundled, first-party e-sign features can help differentiate your product from other vendors, but if the only thing you are selling is e-sign, they probably won't look at you. We do have an in-house e-sign feature in our product now. We evaluated integration with Adobe & DocuSign, but their APIs were so far away from what we needed that we decided to DIY. Consider this - what is a bank going to do with raw access to something approximating docusign APIs? They outsource everything. Their vendors are the ones who would be consuming something like this and then reselling it. Getting onto the QVL for a US financial institution (and staying there) is usually a monster battle if you are a new kid on the block. If you still wanted to market this solution towards US financial institutions, I'd start with the vendors of those institutions. Companies like Jack Henry & Associates, FiServ, CSi, FIS, Harland Clarke, et. al.
- somery 3y ago
  That's interesting that you ended up developing an in-house document e-signing feature for your product. I'm curious, would it be possible for you to choose a self-hosted and open-source solution like Docuseal, integrated with your product to outsource the complexity and speed up the development? (if such an option existed back then?)
  - bob1029 3y ago
    > outsource the complexity Honestly the bulk of complexity seemed to emerge from the mismatch between what we thought would be a good e-sign API and what APIs were actually available. The way our product works, we need to have access to the raw signature specimen at various stages of the signing process because we have a document generation feature that dynamically inserts the specimens into the appropriate fields. Put differently, we don't show the documents until we first have a signature (and initials) specimen collected from the e-sign participant. This is basically the exact opposite of how most vendors work, but our customers really like it this way. We also needed a way to in-line bank-specific e-sign consent documents into the experience, giving the e-signer a way to decline consent and have this decline kick off an appropriate back-office workflow. The other reason we went in house is we wanted to completely close the loop. After the last e-signer completes their piece, our product detects this condition and submits all final documents to the institution's long-term cold storage system. Getting this to work with a 3rd party API looked like a total non-starter to me - We can't just send the docs right away. There are time-of-day constraints on when those systems will be available throughout the week. Our e-sign solution ultimately turned into a workflow-style experience with 6-7 steps.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hgs3 3y ago
Competition is a good thing and a core tenet of capitalism. If we don't have competition and regulators are wedding themselves to one particular business then that means we have a government sanctioned monopoly.

grokgrok 3y ago

If your company has a board and a CFO then sure, go with the trusted solution. If you're starting a scrappy, modern, real world business, things like this can help avoid death by a thousand cuts that is paid microservices.

FpUser 3y ago

>"Eg if you’re a CFO, would you being willing to take the risk just to save a couple of bucks " Typical FUD preached by many online companies to lure customers. Even verbal contracts are enforceable (with the caveats of course). These will be fine for the most boring cases. The others are signed with lawyers anyways.

gamblor956 3y ago
"take the risk" This is the important part you're ignoring. Yes, verbal contracts between businesses are binding, but only to the extent you can actually prove the terms in a court of law. Using DocuSign (or similar) is about risk mitigation, specifically about being able to prove the the contents of the contract in legal proceedings. The risk with being a business that allows for verbal contracts is that one of your vendors may be unscrupulous and truly screw you over. And that's a matter of when, not if.
- FpUser 3y ago
  You are suddenly switching from Ducusign vs Docuseal to DocuSign vs verbal. That was not point of my reply.
- gnicholas 3y ago
  I've never understood how DocuSign mitigates the risk any more than both parties signing a PDF in Preview (or similar) and exchanging via email. Doesn't the email part validate that you are the person signing the document?
  - somery 3y ago
    I think that's a valid point - and actually in their terms of services say that they are not responsible for the signer authenticity. Here is a summary from their TOS: "DocuSign provides tools and features that help to establish the authenticity of a signer, such as email verification, access code, SMS verification, phone verification, and knowledge-based authentication. However, it's important to note that while these tools can enhance the security and authenticity of the signing process, DocuSign itself does not guarantee the authenticity of the signers. The responsibility of ensuring the identity of the other party lies with the user"

guideamigo 3y ago

You are right. Alternative to eSign is to just send PDF documents. And as the person to add their signature to it.

bob1029 3y ago

> eSign tech is a commodity We learned this pretty quickly with our banking products. Having your own bundled, first-party e-sign features can help differentiate your product from other vendors, but if the only thing you are selling is e-sign, they probably won't look at you. We do have an in-house e-sign feature in our product now. We evaluated integration with Adobe & DocuSign, but their APIs were so far away from what we needed that we decided to DIY. Consider this - what is a bank going to do with raw access to something approximating docusign APIs? They outsource everything. Their vendors are the ones who would be consuming something like this and then reselling it. Getting onto the QVL for a US financial institution (and staying there) is usually a monster battle if you are a new kid on the block. If you still wanted to market this solution towards US financial institutions, I'd start with the vendors of those institutions. Companies like Jack Henry & Associates, FiServ, CSi, FIS, Harland Clarke, et. al.

somery 3y ago
That's interesting that you ended up developing an in-house document e-signing feature for your product. I'm curious, would it be possible for you to choose a self-hosted and open-source solution like Docuseal, integrated with your product to outsource the complexity and speed up the development? (if such an option existed back then?)
- bob1029 3y ago
  > outsource the complexity Honestly the bulk of complexity seemed to emerge from the mismatch between what we thought would be a good e-sign API and what APIs were actually available. The way our product works, we need to have access to the raw signature specimen at various stages of the signing process because we have a document generation feature that dynamically inserts the specimens into the appropriate fields. Put differently, we don't show the documents until we first have a signature (and initials) specimen collected from the e-sign participant. This is basically the exact opposite of how most vendors work, but our customers really like it this way. We also needed a way to in-line bank-specific e-sign consent documents into the experience, giving the e-signer a way to decline consent and have this decline kick off an appropriate back-office workflow. The other reason we went in house is we wanted to completely close the loop. After the last e-signer completes their piece, our product detects this condition and submits all final documents to the institution's long-term cold storage system. Getting this to work with a 3rd party API looked like a total non-starter to me - We can't just send the docs right away. There are time-of-day constraints on when those systems will be available throughout the week. Our e-sign solution ultimately turned into a workflow-style experience with 6-7 steps.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hgs3 3y ago

Competition is a good thing and a core tenet of capitalism. If we don't have competition and regulators are wedding themselves to one particular business then that means we have a government sanctioned monopoly.