Insurance technology provider Vertafore and digital transaction manager DocuSign have teamed up to offer e-signature services to Vertafore’s insurance clients. DocuSign’s Digital Transaction Management Platform (DTM) will be available to Vertafore’s personal and commercial line customers who use its Vertafore Agency Platform and AMS360 Online systems, and will be integrated into Vertafore’s Sagitta suite of products later this year.

“The industry is very paper intensive and has a lot of documents that flow through,” says Theo Beack, senior vice president of Engineering and Operations for Vertafore. “It was a natural fit for us to add electronic signature capabilities to our product portfolio.”

According to Miles Kelly, senior director of product marketing for DocuSign, the company has already had a lot of success with a wide variety of industries, including the insurance space, as agencies and carriers look for ways to seamlessly process their applications and claims.

“Agents see the value [of electronic signature systems] but they want to make sure that it easily integrates with the systems they use,” he says.

Through the new partnership, those in the insurance industry – from small agencies to large carriers to individual agents – can subscribe to the DocuSign service and have it bundled with an existing Vertafore personal or commercial lines technology product. The e-signature service is available to insurance clients on applications, renewals, and claims documents – to name a few – and obtains verified signatures on all required fields, which Beack says ensures important documentation is filled out in its entirety.

“There are a lot of insurance documents that flow back and forth and there’s a chance during the signing process where info can be entered inaccurately or illegibly,” he says. “By making it electronic, we streamline the process and can guide users and make sure they don’t omit key or relevant information within the document.”

Kelly says the DocuSign system also allows industry types to process more applications or claims on a daily basis with 100 percent accuracy, which reduces an agent’s E&O exposure. The DocuSign process also meets all the legal requirements if a client claims not to have read what they were signing.

“DocuSign looks at the signature process as is and it still meets the same requirements. From a legal perspective, [the DocuSign process] has never been called into question,” he says.

Kelly and Beack acknowledge that the stigma around the insurance industry is that it is slow to adopt new technology and use services like this that can enhance business, but they say that has not been their experience. In fact, Kelly says DocuSign already works with 11 of the top 15 carriers and the agencies it sees are on the forefront of integrating technology, particularly mobile technology.

“From the top carriers to individual agents, this is a huge part of how they do business. What we see going forward is full adoption,” says Kelly.

Beack says ultimately the industry is looking for technology options that improve the efficiency and provide a better experience to the customer.

“Anything we can do to streamline the process is very well received within agencies of all sizes,” he says. “There is generally a great excitement about the technologies we are introducing.”