With the ongoing pandemic and the consequent push by businesses for digitisation, we’re seeing an increasing demand for automated solutions. This trend is looking to hold steady and will cause a surge in digitisation as businesses experience the benefits of paperless methods,” explain Krupesh Bhat, an entrepreneur with an MBA from the University of Maryland and Ashok Kadsur, an experienced sales professional. After graduating from the same institution, both went their separate ways, but were later brought together by this dream, which they moulded into SignDesk. Bhat, as the founder and CEO, is a diehard entrepreneur who comes with diverse experience in IT, digital marketing and legal. He was passionate about using technology to solve large and complex RegTech problems and as a result, he founded LegalDesk.com and, later, SignDesk. These websites help in creating and signing legal documents online. Kadsur is the co-founder. He has over two decades of experience in sales and marketing, having worked with enterprise solutions, media, telecom, IT and web-based services. He is known to set up new businesses for multiple organisations in the early stages and help turn around businesses profitably. At SignDesk, he heads sales and strategic planning. SignDesk provides businesses with digital documentation and workflow optimisation solutions that are demonstrably quicker and more cost-effective than paper-based manual methods. Currently, this translates to digital customer onboarding and online document verification using AI and ML techniques, real-time online stamp duty payment with document tracking, document creation using legally valid templates and execution using Aadhaar e-signatures & digital signatures, as well as automated recurring payments using eNACH-based eMandates. The best path forward Bhat and Kadsur knew that, given India’s massive population and the scale of operations that Indian businesses undertake, any non-digital method of operations will inadvertently be wasteful and inefficient. They realised that digitisation is the best path forward for India’s corporate sector. So, in 2016 they launched a company to build this path. As a sign of things to come, SignDesk was launched by Nandan Nilekani. It now covers the gamut of business documentation, offering digitised solutions for customer verification, document creation, legalisation, and execution mandates. “The problem facing SignDesk at its inception was that of compliance. Businesses were faced with numerous regulations and compliance resulted in massive costs at a sluggish pace,” says Kadsur whose first steps at SignDesk were to provide a streamlined and automated method to ensure compliance, while reducing these costs and ensuring efficiency. “This resulted in a catalogue of products that digitise onboarding, stamp duty payment, signatures and recurring payments.” SignDesk is meeting these demands with further innovations: “We are launching a standalone document verification system that institutions can use to easily verify customer documents; we are also working on a video conferencing solution built to work with low bandwidth connections aimed at the Indian market and blockchain-based smart contracts,” discloses Bhat whose aim to start SignDesk was to disrupt the status quo of how businesses handle their documentation. “The name SignDesk derives from the fact that electronic signatures were the first of many subsequent disruptive technologies to become market-ready and attract popular appeal. The name is doubly appropriate since we were among the first businesses to provide disruptive documentation solutions,” adds Kadsur.