"emSigner is widely used in the market by large and small organization"

Arvind Srinivasan, SVP – Strategic Initiatives & Global Markets, eMudhra in a chat with VARINDIA discusses how eMudhra is helping in achieving the concept of paperless office and how it is revolutionizing the SMB industry -

What do you think are the key steps to keep in mind for an organization to attain secure digital transformation?

When organizations acquire digital capabilities, it comes with a set of risks that can range across identity theft, data manipulation, access breach, and countless others. It is absolutely important for any organization to keep in mind and parallelly build on the security elements associated with such transformation to ensure that progress is happening in a safe manner. Organizations need to look at strengthening the identity and trust ecosystem that they build within their organization across all employees, stakeholders, and assets. Organizations need to plan a security strategy that encapsulates identity governance (and management), encryption, access management, risk-based authentication, transaction (data) integrity, and data privacy so as to drive change in a secure manner. It is important to look at global best practices in these areas (which generally tend to be the high-risk areas) and have a concrete plan that maps out how each of the above areas will be incorporated into the organization’s digital ecosystem.

How does eMudhra’s flagship product emSigner help in achieving the concept of paperless office?

When we conceptualized the ‘paperless’ concept, the idea was to provide a solution where organizations can substitute the ‘print-sign-scan’ process by leveraging digital signatures to sign and share documents (or XML data). Emsigner helps organizations do exactly that. However, over time, we realized that signing alone, though useful, is not enough for most organizations to achieve their paperless journey in an effective manner. As a result, we have built a robust stack of features to complement the signing module to help organizations across multiple sizes and verticals leverage emSigner as a one-stop paperless suite.

Over time, emSigner feature list has grown to include workflow management, OCR, collaborative editing, document authenticity verification, and many others that organizations typically require in managing document movement across their organization. Most recently, we have enhanced the emSigner API Stack, built the emSigner Gateway (for easy integration), and pre-integrated with popular applications such as Salesforce, Sage, Tally, and more.

Because of the above factors, emSigner is widely used in the market by large and small organization alike to quickly digitize document signing and sharing therefore helping them go paperless, in an easy manner.

How will emSigner help in revolutionizing the SMB industry?

The SMB industry in India is estimated at over 35 million businesses and employs about 106 million people, which makes it a fairly large focus area. Like larger institutions, the SMB’s also have documentation, signing, and sharing requirements, though the use cases generally tend to be different and often, quite focused (i.e. accounting, company law filing, director filing, invoicing, etc.). With emSigner, SMB’s can leverage India’s digital signature ecosystem in combination with emSigner features at a cost-effective rate to manage their document signing, storage, and sharing requirements digitally.

SMB’s often do not require a robust set of features which are generally offered to larger enterprises. This also allows us to offer a very attractive commercial model where using emsigner would essentially help SMB’s operate more efficiently at lower cost. This commercial incentive paired with the ease of doing business that emSigner can enable a good potential for quick adoption in the SMB sector thus changing the way things work today.

How can emSigner help in effective invoice/GST form filing?

emSigner can assist in multiple ways. For one, emSigner can be used to manage the workflow around invoices in an organization which ensures all invoices are digitally signed and a record of all transactions is maintained. Alternately, larger enterprises can opt to ‘bulk-sign’ invoices using the emSigner bulk signing API’s. Since emSigner supports all forms of digital signatures offered in India, it makes digitally signing invoices, an easy process.

With the incidents of ‘documentation frauds’ being on the rise in the education sector in India and abroad, how is eMudhra products helping in curbing this issue?

In education, we have looked at diplomas and transcripts as two key documents where fraud tends to prevail at a growing rate. Diplomas tend to be slightly more complex as they often have to be printed due to the emotional value vested within the diploma and the graduation ceremony where such diploma is conferred upon the student. emSigner leverages the power of digital signatures and QR codes to offer a document authenticity module that can effectively curb document fraud. The module enables digital signing of the diploma by multiple signatories and upon all signatories having signed the document, generates a QR code with an embedded digital signature certificate and encrypted document data fields. The document can then be dispatched digitally via email and printed physically to be used as required. When the receiver of the printed diploma scans the QR code, the digital signature gets validated to ensure that the document is issued by a trusted system and contains valid signatures of all signatories, and the key data points get decrypted, which can be verified against the printed document to ensure that none of the data points have been manipulated.

If the receiver is receiving the document digitally, adobe PDF reader will automatically do the above checks and tell the receiver whether the document is original or counterfeit.

Recently, eMudhra’s Founder and Chairman, Mr V Srinivasan, became the Chairman of the Asia PKI Consortium, what changes will he bring about with this position?

Asia PKI Consortium is a global forum of 10+ countries that drives digital security adoption and awareness. Srinivasan has been an active member of this organization for several years and contributed significantly towards augmenting the reach of this forum, in his earlier position as Vice Chairman. And in his present role as the Chairman of the consortium, he is expected to come up with new initiatives and create new working groups around Technology & Standards, Business Applications, and Legal Policies, which will help the forum to drive Digital Security in a much effective manner.

Last year you forayed into the Latin American and Ghana market, how has been your progress in global markets so far?

There has been significant progress on the global front. We now have 5 international offices of our own, and a strong channel partner ecosystem spread across 38 countries. We are also part of globally respected bodies in our space such as the European Cloud Signature Consortium, Asia PKI consortium, CAB Forum, and have been the first Indian company to do so. We have an active and aggressive international agenda.