With Adobe’s last Acrobat Sign Release of 2024, Adobe is yet again expanding its electronic signature capabilities by adding more flexibility to signature processes and providing additional ways to verify the recipient’s identity.
Managing document templates for multiple user groups
Acrobat Sign users tend to repeatedly use templates to make sending documents for signature more efficient and control the layout and content. Many companies have groups responsible for creating templates for others in the company to use (common examples are legal agreements such as non-disclosure or data protection agreements). With the November 2024 Acrobat Sign release, users can share templates with multiple user groups, even groups they’re not part of, to ensure use of the most recent version across the organization. Learn more here.
When Creating a Template
When Modifying a Template
Notifying users when it counts
Managing time-sensitive agreement signatures has just become easier. By adding a new cc functionality on a recipient level, senders can notify key stakeholders when it’s most relevant. Using this new functionality, for example, in an agreement that requires 3 signatures before it is routed to the CFO and CEO, their executive assistants will only be notified when it's their respective C-level’s turn to review and sign. This feature enables them to speed up the time to agreement completion. Learn more here.
More Power to the recipients - correcting mistakes without sender involvement
Typos, misunderstandings or other errors may happen when filling in agreements before signing, this could include the correct legal entity of a signer, order volumes or new addresses. What before might have required cancelling the agreement, notifying the sender and sending a new agreement can now be in the full power of the recipient. By providing power to the recipients to simply “restart the agreement”, the agreement is sent back to the first recipient with commentary on what needs to be corrected, enabling an easy way to correct mistakes without involving the sender and needing to resend the agreement. Learn more here.
Verifying the recipient’s identity
Organizations that especially rely on processing agreements for the exchange of funds are facing more and more threats regarding identity fraud (in the US alone, 552,000 cases of identity theft occurred in the first half of 2024).
To help combat these fraudulent attempts, Acrobat Sign not only offers a strong ecosystem of Identity Provider partners to assure the identity verification of individuals, but moreover it allows to check the identity of recipients against a predefined value.
To be more specific, Senders will now be able to define the target name as part of the recipient information before sending for signature and requiring the recipient to match that name when proving their identity. The new Identity Check functionality works with all the Digital Identity Gateway partner services, performing highly secure identity verification methods such as ID.me, IDnow, OneID or BankID. The new Identity Check functionality also works with all the Cloud Signature Partners providing regulated digital signature services from more than 50 Trust Service Providers globally.
For example, a fraudster called “John Smith” who tries to impersonate “Frank Brown”, a legitimate beneficiary of government subsidies, would be blocked from signing a claim submission in Frank’s name. That is because the Sender enforced identity verification and using this new feature, would specify Frank’s full name as the intended name, and this feature requires the intended name to match with the identity information returned by the identity provider before providing access to view and sign the document. Even if the fraudster is able to complete the identity verification with the method selected by the Sender, he won’t be able to identify himself as “Frank Brown” and therefore he would be blocked from viewing and signing the agreement. Identity Check criteria and results are also documented in the agreement’s Audit and Signer Identity reports. See more information here.
Adobe also expanded the ability to apply identity verification methods from the Digital Identity Gateway partners for the first Web Form Signer and from the Acrobat Sign integration for Salesforce. Especially for Web Forms that are publicly accessible, verifying the identity of signers is crucial to combat fraudulent transactions. Using trustworthy Identity providers can provide higher assurance and reduce risk in your online processes.
Besides these key highlights of the Acrobat Sign November release, Adobe delivered many other new settings and capabilities. Read about all the new functionalities in the Acrobat Sign Release Notes.
AdChoices