Beyond eSignature: How leading finserv organisations are transforming the agreement process

In our last blog, we wrote about why financial services organisations can’t afford to be late to the paperless party. Here, we continue the conversation with an exploration of how to continue your transformation journey beyond eSignature with Docusign. 

Driven by the expectations of today’s tech-savvy customers, the financial services industry is digitising all aspects of the customer experience. From loan applications to account onboarding, leading companies are embracing transformation by adopting the tools and technologies that today’s customers expect. Tools that deliver a modern, fast and easy experience. 

By continually modernising the customer experience across the end-to-end journey – in other words, doing more than just adding electronic signing of documents (although, that’s a great place to start) – leading organisations are staying a step ahead of the competition and creating a unique selling proposition in the market.

Question is, how have they done so? They’re looking beyond eSignature and are embracing Docusign’s evolving suite of tools to help modernise their end to end agreement process, removing friction from the customer experience and improving the flow of data, upstream and downstream. 

Thanks to ongoing evolution and optimisation, Docusign makes it easier to verify your customers ID, collect data, pre-populate and complete forms, create personalised agreements, capture consent and digitally accept to convert customers faster. Our solutions integrate with your existing tech stack to support straight-through processing by populating or extracting field data and documents and triggering next actions. They can also be embedded into your existing websites and customer portals to seamlessly integrate with your customer experience look and feel. 

Let’s take a look at some of the key ways to further transform your loan agreement processes using Docusign's evolving suite of tools.

Increase loan conversion rates 

In the face of increased competition, lenders are looking at how to increase conversion rates. A great place to start is by breaking down large loan offer packs into easily-digestible chunks, making it easier for customers to consume and accept your loan offer. 

With Docusign, you can now easily embed a simple ‘click to accept’ or ‘digital acceptance’ experience into your loan application process. 

With Elastic Signing, you can embed your agreements directly into websites or applications—as well as fully customise backgrounds, fonts, and colours to add brand-specific elements—for a seamless and visually engaging signing experience. You can also insert dynamic and conditional content to personalise each agreement for individual signers for example including different clauses for different jurisdictions. Enhanced convenience, trust and personalisation increase completion rates, which goes directly toward boosting your bottom line.

Simplify form-filling for your customers 

Lending applications and loan offer contracts are, by their nature, complex. They require the completion of many fields and forms, and this can get tedious. To make it easier for your customers to fill out forms, consider everything from the font size to repeated fields across forms (no-one wants to enter their address twice). Using dynamic webforms to collect the base information relevant to them makes life a whole lot easier for your customers. Make form filling and signing a breeze with web-based, mobile-friendly fillable forms.

Optimising for mobile is also critical these days. Customers want the ability to easily complete and sign loan documentation anywhere, anytime – without the need to pinch or zoom. Docusign eSignature offers mobile friendly features that enhance mobile signing with responsive documents that automatically adjust to the size and orientation of the user’s device. Senders can take responsiveness even further by defining custom formatting options. With responsive signing, you and your customers eliminate annoying pinching and zooming that leads to high abandonment rates. And to make sure your customers get their agreements quickly, SMS delivery and notifications lets you reach customers at any time wherever they are.

Assisted signing sessions are another great way to allow the banker, broker or lender to step the customer through the document in an online signing ceremony that replicates the in-person signing experience. In such sessions, the customer doesn’t need to find the document in their email inbox – they simply log in to the call and the banker or broker can share their screen and grant permission for the customer to sign right then and there on the call. What could be easier?  Securely complete agreements live.

Deliver a premium look and feel

Just need your customer to sign an agreement? With Docusign’s document generation capabilities, you can deliver an elegant, branded letter-style document – without any of the text field boxes cluttering things up. Create professional contracts faster with Document Generation for eSignature or use the pre-built connector to Docusign Gen for Salesforce or integrate with any other CRM with our Gen & Send API. 

Automate and simplify lending workflows

When it comes to digitisation, some processes languish in the too-hard basket. Not so with Docusign. Its rich features offer more flexibility and enable you to tick off on more of the ‘exceptions’ on your list. With Docusign, for example, you can create an all-inclusive process for loan documents that accounts for the nuances of each jurisdiction or lending variation. Once set up, it’s easy to automate even the most complex of processes. 

Here are just some of the streamlined, automated workflows you can set up:

• Advanced recipient routing allows you to automate the 3-day waiting period for guarantor workflows

• Electronic witnessing enables documents to be signed in the states that require it

• Document visibility can separate the view for different parties to the transaction while allowing all documents to be contained in one envelope

• Supplementary docs can be used to add any documents in the loan pack that still require wet signature in certain states, and the upload feature allows them to be added back into the envelope

Integrate with your tech stack 

Many of our lending customers are now offering or looking to offer a more integrated or embedded signing experience. This helps boost security and creates a seamless experience. Docusign can be embedded into your web portal or online banking portal behind the lenders’ or brokers’ login, while using the portal’s existing messaging capabilities. Custom integrations can require a bit more effort but we’ve seen a rapid increase in the number of pre-built connectors, particularly for broker and advisor portals and for loan settlement platforms. See our library of 400+ pre-built integrations or speak to us about your tech stack.

The Docusign Gen for Salesforce integration is a popular and easy way for lenders to quickly integrate and offer a convenient experience. For example, one finserv company transformed home loans with Docusign and Salesforce and another is delivering frictionless flow with Docusign. 

Learn more about modernising the lending process by watching our on-demand webinar: 'Modernising the Lending Process: e-signature and Beyond'.

If you’re looking for more ideas on how you can transform the end-to-end agreement process for your lending customers, speak to Docusign today.