[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 companies. Among these transformations, the introduction of electronic signatures seems obvious. Yet this is not yet the case for many companies in France.

Explanations and outlook with Olivier Pin, General Manager 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. Even so, it's a fast-growing market, and this was already the case before the Covid epidemic. In 2019, DocuSign reported 40% growth. The first two quarters of 2020 showed an acceleration of 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 their entire departments (purchasing, HR, legal, etc.). And some companies that were still reluctant, hesitating or postponing this 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 the reluctance of companies to switch to electronic signatures?

Olivier Pin:

It's 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 relation to 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 make the decision to go digital. During the epidemic, we saw companies implementing mass signature, for example, to get all the employees in a company to sign. Other companies set up contracts that people could draw up as self-service forms and sign themselves. All these features are part of the DocuSign range.

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Which sectors and professions are most ready for a real digital transformation?

Olivier Pin:

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

But as we analyzed what our more mature customers were doing, we realized that once the electronic signature was in place, it opened the door to the digitization of a much broader lifecycle, which we call DocuSign CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management). It is divided into 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?
• Signature
• Execution: once the agreement has been signed, how do we implement the services we've agreed on? This means integrating the contract into the various operational systems.
• And finally, management: how do we archive, retrieve and renew contracts once they're underway?

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

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

We've 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 stakeholder satisfaction, 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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