The entire business documentation process has traditionally been disparate, inefficient and paper-based. This has resulted in massive financial burdens, especially for Indian businesses which have been even slower to adopt emerging technologies for documentation. SignDesk was started to disrupt these traditions and provide businesses with the tools to optimise and streamline the way they document, so that they could conduct their operations smoothly without worrying about the frustrating details of documentation.

On SignDesk’s journey to digitise all of business documentation, they have managed to automate a slew of processes including onboarding, document legalisation, document execution, contracting, and recurring payments. Technology has played a pivotal role while machine learning techniques and artificial intelligence (AI) have allowed SignDesk to build high-level compliance and verification mechanisms that are quick and easy to use.

“Our solutions have been met with enthusiasm and great results, we have helped reduce onboarding costs by nearly 90 per cent for our clients and have boosted efficiency by an unbelievable 99 per cent. The credit for these metrics is shared between our cutting-edge technology, our strong legal team and our operations capabilities, all of which have turned us into a well-oiled machine. Our efforts to digitise documentation have been recognised in the form of several awards, the latest of which is the Global Banking and Finance Review’s Best Digital KYC/Onboarding Product of India in 2020,” says Bhat.

“Compliance with regulations has always been a major issue for businesses in India, particularly financial institutions. These businesses have to strike a balance between compliance and ensuring a smooth client journey that’s also cost-effective – no easy task. This niche, therefore, was ripe for digitisation, and we jumped at the opportunity. The solutions we provide strike the perfect balance between all the factors that businesses have to consider, and hence have been immensely popular. We ensure a smooth and completely automated documentation process, using the best technology available and client-specific customisations,” says Kadsur.

In many cases, SignDesk’s products have also been integrated with each other to create an end-to-end solution applicable to numerous cases including loan disbursement and customer verification. “This sort of ‘all-in-one’ solution is the future of RegTech as it is expedient, seamless and secure. All of our products are of this nature, enabling clients to perform their documentation using just our product. Additionally, we also offer APIs that can be easily integrated into business-normal processes. RegTech looks to be growing especially now as businesses are coming around to digitisation, and we look forward to providing more businesses with the best, quickest and most efficient documentation tools around. SignDesk’s first client was Hindustan Unilever Ltd, who are still one of our most valued clients. Our business model is based on revenue per transaction. We provide SaaS-based services and based on the usage of our services, we charge our clients on a monthly basis,” adds Bhat, boasting of clients that include ICICI Bank, Kotak Bank, Karnataka Bank, L&T Financial Services, Bajaj Finserv, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, Swiggy, Loreal and Panasonic, to name a few.

“Being an old generation private sector bank, it was a Herculean task for our bank to design and create a product capable of competing with other existing products. When we studied other banks’ digital journeys, we found that seamless e-stamping and e-signing of online loan documents was difficult and we had very few reliable vendors who could implement these integrations. SignDesk helped us with simple and quick APIs for e-stamping and e-signing. The cloud-based and legally accepted solution that is securely hosted in India made our life easy. More than this, it was the legal team of SignDesk which provided clarity to our legal team and the confidence to adapt online e-stamping,” says Rakesh B, assistant general manager, Digital Centre of Excellence at Karnataka Bank.

“Our projected net revenue for the next five years is Rs155 crore. In 2016-17 we were Rs44 lakh and we grew in 2018-19 to Rs1.65 crore and in 2019-20 to Rs7 crore. Our topline was Rs15 crore and Rs50 crore respectively,” says Bhat.

“We are a fully bootstrapped organisation and have become profitable since 2017. We have grown to employ 120 tech professionals and are planning to go overseas with the possibility of new acquisitions and hires. In the next five years we envision an employee expansion of up to 500 professionals and are looking to raise $5 million to fund our expansion,” says Kadsur. 

“The numbers are clear in their message that even now, businesses are not reaping the full benefits of digitisation despite how far our technology has progressed, and this is causing massive problems. SignDesk has the sole aim of solving these problems, and will continue to solve them with the best cutting-edge technology,” observes Bhat. 

However, SignDesk’s main agenda is to provide a single online platform where businesses can perform all their documentation, including document creation, legalisation, negotiation and related payments. This is something that SignDesk is perpetually working towards. As SignDesk strives for a Digital India, it is also expanding to other countries to address the documentation requirements of financial institutions.