E-sealing being a rather new topic and practice among businesses, still raises quite a lot of questions. We’ve noticed that there’s not that much you can find on the internet about it, let alone identify real use cases that would actually be useful in helping to make a decision. In order to change that, we’ve gathered real use examples from our customers and added them in one place.
In short, e-sealing basically serves for two goals: either to guarantee origin and integrity of documents or to enable machine to machine processes that allow to eliminate manual work. In some cases these both goals can be combined. So let’s see where electronic seals could come in handy in your organisation.
USE CASE #1: sensitive information
Electronic seals are ideal if you need to guarantee integrity and origin of sensitive information, e.g., tax reports, person’s health information.
How it works in practice:
- one of our customers that provides lending services, seals support phone calls to make sure that those calls have not been tampered with and everything that’s been agreed via the call is valid. This is especially useful for companies that provide financial services and make verbal agreements via phone calls;
- another real use case from our customers’ experience is sealing blood test results. This allows clinic’s customers to be sure that the results that are emailed are real and truly received from the certain clinic;
- e-seals are also used in an e-court system that allows lawyers to create and submit court documents to the courts electronically to ensure the content of the document has not been changed.
USE CASE #2: documents without e-signature
E-sealing is also ideal if you need to guarantee integrity and origin of digital documents.
How it works in practice:
- some of our customers in telco sector use seals for scanned documents, e.g., service contracts when they are signed by their clients by hand. It is useful when there are no special technologies adopted in the service centers;
- others seal documents that are signed using tablets, i.e., where a signature is drawn on a screen. As drawn signatures are vulnerable and could easily be tampered with, sealing such documents ensures their origin and validity. This option is also popular in service centers of mobile operators or leasing companies that have already adopted some level of technologies;
- e-seals are also used in companies that want to digitise incoming paper documents whether it’s an invoice or a contract. Once you receive a paper document, you scan it and add an e-seal on it to make sure they won’t get photoshopped or changed in any other way.
USE CASE #3: automatically generated documents
E-seals can come in handy for automating some processes by sealing automatically generated documents, e.g., invoices, payment statements, statements from databases.
How it works in practice:
- electronic seals are often used for invoices that are generated automatically at the end of the month. This allows to ensure the customers they received their invoices from a certain company. But why is it important? Automatically generated documents can often be a target for forgery: it is easy these days to forge an invoice with a changed IBAN number and send it to a client a day before the real service provider does. This approach would work on any other document that doesn’t require manual work as well. E-seals help to avoid this because they confirm the document’s originated from a certain company.
USE CASE #4: operational processes
Electronic sealing is also ideal for confirming operational processes by automatically checking received and e-sealed information.
How it works in practice:
- in most cases this machine to machine option is used in those institutions that receive many documents and want to simplify the processes so that a human being does’t have to check all the documents in order to confirm further operations. For example, it can be used among payment service providers and banks when automatically processing instant payments — once a person makes a transaction, a bank needs to check and confirm it, so if a payment transaction is confirmed with an electronic seal, the checking process can be implemented automatically as the machine is able to verify that data originates from the payment service provider. This exact use case is especially applicable to all the services that operate under PSD2 directive.
Found something that could work for you or have more questions? Check more information here and contact us, we’re ready to help in any way we can!