There are a lot of things you can get on-demand these days, now Docusign is launching a ‘Notary on-Demand’ service that will hook you up with a professional to sign-off on the more than 1 billion documents needing this treatment each year in the US.
The service – which clearly has a large addressable market – is going to be available 24/7, they said, and across all of the US.
Just as they cracked the e-signature world, now they’re coming after the notarization field. The on-demand system ‘addresses a critical need in high-risk agreement transactions, where traditional notarization remains a time-consuming, in-person, paper-based process. [This is] causing delays in closing real estate deals, completing loans, finalizing estate plans, and other critical business processes.’
This sounds like a great service. Why should individuals and businesses have to wait for ages to get a piece of paper ‘signed and stamped’, and in fact often struggle to find someone who can do it for them?
And this is all very positive – the one challenge of course is that there is still a need for real, live notaries on the end of this system.
Could we get to a point where a trusted AI system could do all of that ‘signing and stamping’? Maybe it could be regulated by the government, or local Bars? Signature can be made digital, but notarization still needs a human on the other end, even with Docusign’s efficiency-providing system.
That said, the pricing is not a barrier for most, with ‘$30 for first Signer and up to 3 Seals; $5 for each additional Seal’, the company told this site.
Mangesh Bhandarkar, GVP, Product Management at Docusign, said: ‘By integrating Notary On-Demand into the Docusign Intelligent Agreement Management platform, organizations can reduce identity fraud and simplify agreements with an all-in-one trusted solution for notarization, ID verification, and witnessing.’
Beta testers are already seeing significant improvements in their operations, they noted, with one company saying they’d reduced the time taken to handle funding home equity requests by 20%.
The company also mentioned that because of their digital platform used for reaching the notaries a reliable audit trail is kept in the Docusign system, which helps reduce risk.
All of this builds upon their Intelligent Agreement Management platform, which also includes a CLM, offering. Last year they bought Lexion, and in 2018 they bought SpringCM.
