Experiences of business applications featured by digital signatures – a case study

The idea of digital signatures was theorized in 1976 and in 1999 they were first recognised in European legislation. In 2018 they are well established as the most trusted way to get documents signed online. The most important aspects of digital signatures are user authentication, content integrity and non-repudiation of the digital signature. The case bank of this study started their digital signature project in 2012 and it was taken into production in the beginning of 2016. Since then a wide variety of contract types and services have been added and integrated to the solution. The digital signature solution has had a profound impact on the process of contract signing, both on the bank and the customers; enabling e.g. the latter to read and accept (or reject) contracts whenever and wherever they can access the bank’s signing service. It is estimated that the cost savings of using digital signatures vs. paper-based methods are €3 / signature. Data collection and interviews were used to chart the service lifecycle of services integrated to the solution and to map the changes in business adoption and customer usage of the solution between January 2016 and August 2018. The linear growth in the number of signatures processed by the solution has been, on average, 17% per month. The number of services in the solution has increased from 3 to 74 during that time, ranging from credit card applications to mortgage contracts. The lifecycle management of the services which utilise the digital signature solution follows ITIL very closely with some aspects modelled after the IT Standard for Business. The solution sees continual improvement with requests for change received and collected from all stakeholder parties