Adobe announces Aadhaar Integration in Adobe Sign

New Delhi: Adobe has commissioned an industry study for India, revealing how e-signatures are set to fundamentally change the way India does business, and augment the Government`s national digital transformation drive.

Featuring data from a September 2017 Adobe-commissioned survey conducted by Forrester Consulting, the Adobe E-signatures Indian Market Study found that the market for e-signatures in India is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 57 percent, and is expected to cross over a massive 90 million transactions by 2020.

Building on the potential widespread adoption of e-signatures in India, Adobe today announced two strategic investments made by the company for the Indian market - integration of Aadhaar-based authentication in its e-signature solution Adobe Sign, and the launch of a local data centre.

"As India leapfrogs to the next phase of digital transformation, e-signatures are becoming a big bet for businesses of all sizes and across industries. According to the Adobe market sizing survey, more than 85 percent companies in India are looking at investing in e-signature solutions in next 12 months," said managing director South Asia Adobe, Kulmeet Bawa.

"With around 30 percent market penetration, and about 70 percent of companies yet to start their e-signature journey and reap the many rewards - the Aadhaar-based authentication built in Adobe Sign is the industry`s first solution to make e-signatures legally binding in India. 

This legal validity will spur adoption among businesses that have so far had to limit the use of e-signatures to internal use, and allow them to truly transform digitally.

We are confident that this Aadhar based signing in Adobe Sign will accelerate use cases like digital onboarding of customers and employees, and taking citizen services online - augmenting our national vision on Digital India," added Kulmeet Bawa.

Aadhaar-based e-signature in Adobe Sign will help organizations eliminate their dependence on wet signatures, and transform workflows by digitally validating the legal identity of users to sign documents - anytime, anywhere. 

This will play a critical role in helping businesses become resource efficient and unburden them of lengthy administrative procedures involved in documentation and approvals, and most importantly, allow them to deliver an exceptional experience to their end users.

While the electronic signature market in India is still in the early stages of adoption - according to the report, nearly 55 percent of those surveyed believe that an e-signature solution could save up between 10-25 percent of IT operating costs (compared to running paper-based processes) as well as labour and time savings of their employees directly involved in the process. 

For customers, this will introduce a hassle-free, secure, and convenient way of signing documents digitally."Digital technology has fundamentally changed the markets in which companies operate and the speed at which they need to operate to remain competitive. 

E-Signatures remove the friction inherent in transactions that involve people, documents, and data to create faster, more convenient and secure processes. 

Adobe Sign, our e-sign solution is the world`s top choice for getting documents signed - quickly, legally, securely," added Kulmeet.

As per the study, 57 percent of Indian businesses indicate that if they were to adopt a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution, they would prefer for its hosting location to be in India. 

In response to the market requirements, and to further invest in the adoption of e-signatures in India, Adobe has announced the roll out of a new local data centre in India, placing the computing power closer to end users.

Led by Adobe`s engineering labs in India, which comprises nearly one third of the company`s global R&D operations, both these initiatives have been designed to deliver on the needs of the Indian market.

"India is a strategic focus for Adobe, and our engineering labs are committed to making deep investments to deliver innovative and customised solutions to address the needs of our customers here, as well as other parts of the world," said vice president, engineering, Adobe Document Cloud, Abhigyan Modi.

Adobe is uniquely positioned to help businesses move forward into a digital future, where convenience and efficiency ensure a superior customer experience. 

The world`s leading digital document service, Adobe Document Cloud leverages the PDF standard that Adobe pioneered, and enables businesses to transform inefficient paper-based processes to digital. Learn more about Adobe Digital Signatures and Adobe Document Cloud.