[ITW] Olivier Pin, VP Product Management International and Managing Director of DocuSign France

The Covid crisis has demonstrated, if proof were needed, the absolute necessity of a rapid digital transformation of businesses. Among these transformations, the introduction of electronic signatures seems obvious. However, this is not yet the case for many companies in France.

Here we talk to Olivier Pin, Managing Director of DocuSign France and Global SVP Product.

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Where do we stand today with electronic signatures? Has there been mass adoption as a result of the Covid events?

Olivier Pin:

Today, only one company in two in France has adopted the electronic signature. Despite everything, it's a fast-growing market and that was already the case before the Covid epidemic. For 2019, DocuSign had growth of 40%. The first two quarters of 2020 showed an acceleration in this trend, with growth of around 60%.

What we're seeing is that customers who have already adopted DocuSign have had to develop it across all their departments (purchasing, HR, legal, etc.). And some companies that were still reluctant, hesitating or postponing the decision have urgently asked to implement electronic signature services for the same reasons: we were all confined to our homes, with postal services often struggling, and to ensure business continuity we had to adopt this kind of solution. Since then, the trend towards more flexible working from home has continued to grow, and our services meet this demand.

How do you explain this reluctance on the part of companies, which are sometimes still reluctant to switch to electronic signatures?

Olivier Pin:

This is essentially due to inertia. But it has to be said that the regulatory framework in Europe has only recently evolved. We had to wait until the 2014 European eIDAS regulation to define a framework for electronic signatures. It was then established that electronic signatures could not be discriminated against in comparison with paper signatures. Three levels of signature were also defined: simple, advanced and qualified.

It was with this stronger regulatory framework that we began to see a very clear acceleration, because for companies, the framework was established and it was easier to take the decision to go digital. During the epidemic, we saw some companies introduce mass signatures, so that, for example, all the employees in a company could sign. Other companies introduced contracts that people could draw up in the form of self-service forms and sign themselves. All these features are part of the DocuSign range.

See all software Electronic Signature

Which sectors and businesses are most ready to make the transition to a real digital transformation?

Olivier Pin:

For the first 15 years of its life, our company DocuSign focused on one goal: eliminating paper. To go digital and become the leader in electronic signatures and a trusted service provider with DocuSign eSignature.

But when we looked at what our most mature customers were doing, we realised that once the electronic signature was in place, it opened the door to the digitisation of a much broader lifecycle, which we call DocuSign CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management). It consists of 4 main stages:

• Preparing the agreement: how do you generate the agreement with the right data, how do you negotiate it, how do you approve it?
• Signing the agreement
• Implementation: once the agreement has been signed, how do we implement the services we have agreed? This means integrating the contract into the various operational systems.
• And finally, management: how do we archive, retrieve and renew contracts once they are underway?

These four states make up the life cycle of agreements. And very often, companies manage this lifecycle with separate or manual solutions, thereby losing out on the benefits of digitisation.

Agreements and contracts are present in every company and in every department. This applies to all industries and all processes.

We have seen a sharp acceleration in demand since the start of the pandemic. The benefits in terms of time and cost are obvious, but so is the satisfaction of stakeholders, both on the customer side and within companies themselves. For us, this is an irreversible transformation that goes far beyond the current circumstances.

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