Since the concept of business and legal relationships emerged, trust and identity have played a fundamental role. Ink signatures have long signified trust and identity in business deals, real estate transactions, courtroom procedures and other arenas. These “wet” signatures have been adequate for centuries, but today’s digital transformation accelerates change. Innovative business models and processes are transforming the landscape and opening up a variety of new use cases. Enterprises are increasingly globalized, and work models are evolving, introducing a greater need to safely support business transactions across a variety of environments.

Signatures aren’t just limited to document signing but are being utilized in a wider variety of environments, like code signing, to validate the identity of the software author or publisher and verify that the file has not been altered or tampered with since it was signed.

The constantly evolving cybersecurity threat landscape poses new challenges for trust and identity. New advances in AI, deepfake technology and other threats have made it easier for bad actors to impersonate individuals and acquire false credentials for malicious activity. As the world changes, it’s clear that signature methods must change with it.

Assuring Trust in a Digital World

Digital signatures are ideal for addressing today’s challenges, providing the robust security, flexibility and scalability that organizations require for a wide range of use cases. They also offer several advantages traditional “wet” signatures can’t.

Security is more robust because digital signatures are capable of proving the identity of the signatory by uniquely linking to them. They can be managed at scale, making them ideal for large organizations with high volumes of transactions. Digital signatures are also capable of supporting many electronic signature standards for specific use cases, including CMS Advanced Electronic Signature (CAdES), PDF Advanced Electronic Signature (PAdES), JSON Advanced Electronic Signatures (JAdES) and XML Advanced Electronic Signature (XAdES).

Digital signatures also empower organizations with more control over the longevity of signed documents, enabling them to avoid expiration issues by adding timestamps for Long Term Validation (LTV). LTV demonstrates that a document remains valid and has not been tampered with if it is opened in the future.

Adoption Roadblocks Still Remain

Digital signatures are a powerful solution that lets organizations tackle the latest challenges around digital trust. The global e-signature market is growing fast, at a CAGR of 26.6% from 2021 to 2030, according to Prescient & Strategic Intelligence research. Yet despite its growth, some issues are still hampering the adoption of e-signatures.

Multiple accepted standards are currently used, including AdES, ETSI and eIDAS. However, these standards have different levels of recognition and acceptance depending on their country. As they utilize these signatures, global organizations must deal with different regulations, which defeats many of the inherent efficiency advantages of digital signatures.

Organizational inertia is also hampering the adoption of digital trust. Executives have many different priorities, and in many cases, signatures may not be perceived as a primary business driver. Traditional signatures cost nothing, and no training is needed. But when it comes to trust and identity, the stakes are high. The old saying, “It’s not a business driver until it’s a business liability” very much holds.

In some important ways, the adoption of digital signatures is similar to the escalating transition from paper currency and coins to electronic payment systems. The COVID pandemic demonstrated the efficiency of digital signatures in many environments. For example, in the judicial chain in the Netherlands, police, lawyers and courts all rely on multiple sets of documents to move defendants through the system. A single defendant might have hundreds of paper documents that must be signed at every step of the process. The COVID outbreak prompted these courts to migrate to digital signatures — and also demonstrated their scalability and efficiency compared to traditional ink signatures.

Today, dozens of organizations throughout the judicial chain have onboarded digital signature solutions.

Bringing Down Barriers to Acceptance

Industry organizations have an important role to play in overcoming some of these adoption obstacles. They not only participate in establishing and updating global trust standards but are actively taking steps to increase the adoption of these standards.

For example, the Cloud Signature Consortium has established a global interoperability standard for signatures in the cloud. The objective is to dramatically reduce the need for multiple standards and products for global transactions. DigiCert, a longtime leader in digital trust, is working closely with counterparts in the Consortium to refine and finalize the standard.

These developments are all part of a broad trend toward driving greater digital trust across all digital interactions and transactions. For example, eIDAS 2.0 from the European Commission is going beyond signatures and broadening the concept of identity to include physical services and transactions accessible from any location worldwide. Critical to the regulation is the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI), which provides digital identity verification, with the user in control of personal information and data.

As new regulations continue to minimize friction and increase the usability of digital signatures, we’ll see increased adoption soon.