Adobe Acrobat Sign raises the bar for trusted digital agreements with digital identity gateway

Image credit: Adobe Stock/ GreatKimFamilyStudio.

The transition to remote working in recent years has seen a significant spike in the adoption of e-signatures, as organisations strive to keep operations moving when more and more companies are adopting hybrid work policies. As a result, wet ink signatures are no longer practical.

But within this rush to deploy e-signatures, we see another unmistakeable trend emerging: a clear shift to forms of e-signature that offer higher levels of trust — where the identity of the signatory is validated by a trusted third party. IDC e-Signature adoption trends (March 2022) reported that 46 percent of North American enterprises required secure digital signatures.

This shift is driven by some clear global trends:

• Organisations are striving to better manage the risks associated with conducting business remotely with unknown, unseen customers, vendors, partners etc.
• The increased availability of digital identity schemes, whether from national governments or trusted private sector organisations like banks, makes it easier to validate signer identity.
• The global proliferation of laws, often modelled on the EU’s eIDAS Regulation, that give additional legal weight to forms of e-signature that include ID verification.

In response to these trends, Adobe recently made available an important new feature called the Digital Identity Gateway (DIG). The DIG allows organizations to deploy a wide variety of pre-configured third-party digital identity providers (IDP) in their signing workflows, to get agreements signed as quickly and safely as possible while managing risk and protecting their organisation.

It’s a significant innovation that we think will drive the future of digital agreements. For now, we’re proud to confirm the availability the following first group of services:

• IDnow: A leading European provider of ID verification and authentication services.
• ID.me: A leading US provider of ID verification and authentication services, with FedRAMP Moderate authorization.
• Swedish BankID, Norway BankID, Finnish Trust Network, MitID Denmark: Integrations provided by our long-standing partner, Intesi.
• MyNumber Japan: The MyNa app from Toppan Japan provides the first integration with Adobe Acrobat Sign for ID verification using the Japan MyNumber card.

We’re calling the e-signatures created with DIG providers “verified signatures,” to underline that — compared to a simple document check or phone pin authorisation — there is an effective third-party verification of the signer’s identity. Verified signatures complement our broad offering of digital signatures — known as QES or AES in the EU — where the signer’s identity is verified and then cryptographically linked with a digital certificate to the signed document, in compliance with local legal requirements.

We have ambitious plans to add further providers over the coming months, giving our customers access to widely available government and private sector eIDs, as well as consumer-friendly ID verification technologies, to ensure strong signer authentication at the point of signature across the world. With the launch of the DIG, Acrobat Sign is better equipped than ever before to handle all our customers e-signature workflows, from low-friction simple e-signatures through to high trust signatures.