Software and hardware from a single source is in high demand when it comes to electronic signatures

Provinzial Rheinland Versicherung began implementing an electronic signature solution on a large scale some time ago. With signature pads and signotec’s SignoSign software, branch managers and customer service representatives at Provinzial can provide their customers with electronic claim documents, and customers can sign them electronically. This allows for significantly faster processing.

Biometric signature technology has been well established at insurance companies as well as at banks and savings banks for many years. This process fulfils all of the criteria for a legally binding electronic signature in accordance with the German Digital Signature Act. The legal quality of this sophisticated signature is recognised today by all financial service providers and insurers and is therefore used on a daily basis.

In everyday interactions with customers at a bank, the pen-pad-based process has the advantage that the customer does not need an electronic signature card and that the bank can maintain established printed form-based processes. It is comparable to the process at the Landessparkasse zu Oldenburg, for example, which also works with signotec technology. If a printed form is filled out at the counter, the customer receives a signed original; at the same moment, the bank has a signed electronic version that can be processed in its internal workflow systems immediately and without any media discontinuities.

In cases such as these, financial institutions and insurers like Provinzial prefer integrated solutions like those of signotec – solutions that provide the hardware and software solutions required for the electronic signature process from a single source. The company’s software, SignoSign, has long been considered the European standard when it comes to processing signatures electronically using signature pads or tablet PCs. As a logical consequence of this, the manufacturer has been working on its own hardware since the beginning of 2010 and now offers two signature pads developed in house and fully in line with the ‘Made in Germany’ brand.

With the ‘Sigma’ and ‘Omega’ models, signotec has set new standards in electronic signature capturing. The pads have been well received on the market – and not just because of their size and display resolution, their excellent depiction of graphics and text and their expanded technical features for digitising signatures. They also boast an elegant design and extremely flat construction that allows for ergonomic signing. The signer signs on the pen pad, and the software ensures that while the signature is being captured and digitised, both its static visual properties and the signatory’s individual handwriting characteristics will be securely incorporated in the document. Writing speed, the number of breaks, script width and size, etc. are all dynamic, biometric characteristics that can be used to authenticate the signer.

Sigma and Omega digitise and record the direction, time and pressure coordinates of signatures at a sample rate of 500 samples per second. The resulting high data quality guarantees the best possible signature authentication. Data transfer between pad and PC is protected, making it impossible for unauthorised parties to access the biometric data.

signotec also received the official TÜV seal from an independent expert, providing an additional certification that the combined solutions for electronic signatures are 100% secure. In the context of a successful audit by experts from tekit Consult Bonn GmbH, the current version 8.2 of SignoSign received the ‘tested software’ certification from the German technical inspection association TÜV Saarland in spring 2010. For this reason, comprehensive solutions like these generally meet with great interest in the banking and insurance sector: Companies like BBBank eG, LZO, a wide range of savings banks, cooperative banks and state-guaranteed banks, and well-known insurers like AWD, HDI, Basler Versicherungen, Concordia Versicherungsgruppe, Mannheimer Versicherung, DEVK, INTER, Helvetia and others have already made the decision to purchase software and hardware from signotec.

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