The need to support offline e-signatures or electronic transactions in a disconnected environment may not come to mind when you think about automating your processes with electronic signatures. But it should, especially if you’re comparing today’s technology to the way business used to be done on paper. What we can’t forget, though, is that despite our extreme connectivity and our desire to take business transactions completely paperless, sometimes situations call for different approaches.

Take, for example, the situation of the wealth management advisor meeting in their client’s office in a city filled with skyscrapers, or on a remotely located estate. The fact is that Internet connectivity can be an issue in both locations. It makes good sense that your solution provide offline e-signatures through built-in functionality whereby logic is downloaded to the mobile device so that the transaction can be competed offline if necessary, and the customer’s signature can be captured regardless of Internet status. And once a signal is available again, the solution should automatically synchronize and upload the e-signed documents and other transaction data to the server. In this case, mobile tablets are the ideal device since it provides local storage that can be used for offline e-signing.

In a similar vein, even a “paperless” mobile transaction needs to have the flexibility to accommodate paper when necessary. This doesn’t mean your business users should be forced back to paper because of limitations in your mobile e-signature solution. It comes down to user experience and being able to accommodate customers who prefer to review documents on paper.

To truly be able to e-sign anytime and anywhere, users should be able to adopt a hybrid paper-electronic approach that provides a customer with a bar-coded document on paper for review and the ability to use a mobile device to capture the customer’s e-signature. Even in the most modern of branches that use tablets to capture customers’ signatures electronically, an e-signature solution that makes room for paper lets the process continue electronically while accommodating the customer’s preference.

Do you work for a financial service company and are you interested in how your organization can apply e-signatures? Join over 200 attendees from banks of all sizes in North America and hear how they’ve taken their processes electronic and the customer satisfaction, cost and time savings they’ve achieved. Register now.

The points mentioned in this post come from a larger article on the top 10 enterprise mobile e-signature requirements. If you’d like to read more about these, download the article here.

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