If you’re a financial advisor, the paperless office probably seems pretty far away. Most advisors are bombarded by paper documents all day, every day. But you might not know that you don’t have to go completely paperless to reap a lot of the benefits of a paperless office.
Electronic signatures can help firms take a big step toward going paperless, and the benefits go way beyond just “going green.” Using digital documents can benefit advisors by making documents available on any machine with an Internet connection. And you’ll also get the peace of mind knowing that your clients’ information is safe and secure.
Top 5 Benefits of Digital Signatures for Financial Advisers:
- Faster and More Accurate Transactions
Digital signatures help you get client signatures on investment documents in hours instead of days or weeks. And unlike paper documents, digital signatures can enable mandatory fields, which means you’ll have 100 percent complete documents every time. That means you never need to track down clients and have them re-send or re-sign documents. - Boost Advisor and Client Satisfaction
With digital signatures, your clients and brokers can sign documents anytime, anywhere on any device. This technology makes it faster and easier to interact with your firm. Plus it’s easy! Every second, someone signs a document with SIGNiX, the global leader in secure digital signatures. - Reduce Your Operating Costs
Digital signatures save financial advisors time because documents can be sent out for signature instantly. This gives you more time to spend on relationship building and sales instead of paperwork. Not to mention the savings you’ll see by reducing the need to print, fax and mail documents. - Rest Easy with Best-in-Class Document Security
SIGNiX differentiates itself by offering the highest possible level of document security. A highly detailed and legally binding audit trail is embedded in each document, giving more than enough evidence in the event of arbitration. In addition, SIGNiX is the only e-signature solution to offer highly secure digital shredding. Many firms prefer to store confidential client documents on their own servers, and SIGNiX’s exclusive Vendor Freedom technology gives firms this option. - Enable Straight Through Processing
With SIGNiX, you go beyond simply collecting digital signatures. All documents, data and signatures can connect to your back-end system and be routed to your intermediaries. This eliminates faxing, scanning and manual re-keying. And because data fields get collected, captured and verified at the point of signature, you’ll see a drastic reduction in NIGO documents.
Finding a digital signature product is a major key to getting rid of paper waste. Broker-dealers rely on signatures for all major transactions, and using handwritten signatures can be a huge barrier to going completely paperless. The good news is that digital signature technology has advanced leaps and bounds in the past few years. These days, digital signatures are even more secure than handwritten signatures.
But don’t be fooled into thinking every online signature service is secure. There’s a difference between electronic signatures and digital signatures that you should be aware of before choosing an electronic signature vendor.
Looking for more information on contract management software? Check out our side-by-side comparison of leading platforms in the Top 10 Contract Management Software report. You can also browse exclusive Business-Software.com resources on CLM and e-signature solutions on our contract management research page.
[This post originally appeared on the SIGNiX blog and is republished with permission.]