What is eSealing?
eSealing is an innovative digital signing service offered by SSL.com that aims to help companies quickly sign thousands of documents with legally binding digital signatures.
What makes a digital signature valid, when applied to documents such as a PDF or MS Document, is a certificate that can be obtained from a certificate authority such as SSL.com. This is how the signatory’s identity is confirmed, applied digitally to the document, and where security features such as non-repudiation and timestamps are applied.
SSL.com offers Organization Validated document signing certificates powered by our eSigner cloud signing service to produce digital signatures bound to an organization’s identity. As a reputable certificate authority and member of the Adobe Approved Trust List (AATL), SSL.com’s Business Identity certificates are internationally trusted for signing virtual documents, including Adobe PDF and Microsoft Office file types. This means that both Acrobat and Microsoft view our PDF signatures as valid and your customers will not see error messages about your signature in these applications.
An organization-validated signing certificate can be useful for often-used templated agreements where the company, not an individual, is who should be represented.
Signing such documents at scale individually can be inefficient and time-consuming when using hardware tokens and OTP codes for authentication, especially when signing large batches of documents such as end-of-month invoices.
With eSealing, a high-volume of documents can be “sealed” with the organization’s identity, providing the security benefits and legally-binding digital signatures available with an SSL.com document signing certificate.
What types of documents can be signed through eSealing?
More companies are both accepting and being required to provide digital signatures to business documents ensuring that adoption will continue to grow in the coming years. The implementation of eSealing will help a company readily adapt to the requirements that come with the continued digitalization of business.
Invoices, regularly-used terms and conditions, estimates, pre-generated statements of work and other similar documents often require the same security features to prevent unauthorized changes or tampering.
Examples of invoices that can be speedily authenticated through eSealing include those for contractors/subcontractors, vendors, suppliers, clients, and customers. With eSealing, you can gain strong protection from the threat of fake invoice scams and fake change order requests that have cost millions of dollars to many companies.
How does eSealing enhance the processing of business documents?
eSealing levels up digital signature technology by allowing an individual to sign a document on behalf of a whole organization. With eSealing, a certificate is issued to the organization and even just one authorized individual can sign thousands of documents with it.
If you are the CEO or an authorized representative of your company, we can provide you an eSealing certificate and you can use our cloud-based signing platform express.esigner.com to sign your own documents. Multiple individuals can also be designated as authorized representatives and share the same eSealing certificate thus improving the logistics in processing documents.
Implementing eSealing?
We currently have two components that can provide eSealing at a high volume, one is a document signing API that is a RESTful service and the other is a document signing command line tool which can do the task upon a certain command.
If a company wants to have thousands of documents digitally signed in an automated way, they can write a script that can call our Document Signing API or the Document Signing Tool. eSealing requires only the hash of the document to be sent over the wire ensuring that the full document does not leave the company network.
When building automations using our signing operations API, digitally signing thousands of documents through eSealing can be accomplished very quickly especially when compared to a group of individuals manually signing the same amount of files, who will take days to finish.
Requirements for eSealing
To be eligible for our eSealing service, organizations must obtain an Organization Validated (OV) certificate from a Certificate Authority like us. Take note that OV certificates require more validation but they do provide more trust.
How can you get eSealing?
Those with an existing OV certificate should contact support@stg.ssl.com while those who are getting new eSealing signing solutions should contact sales@stg.ssl.com.