Technology is increasingly becoming a part of our lives. Soon it will be possible to sign a contract in a bank, with an insurer or to receive a courier parcel with a signature on a tablet. This process has already begun, but the mass implementation of the biometric signature will still take a while. Why will it be so popular and why are companies so eager to implement it? There are several reasons.
Imagine a large company with a network of customer service offices (CSOs) spread across the country. Telecoms, mobile insurers, claims handlers, gas companies, energy distributors, banks, post offices... The list is long. Each of these companies, in order to service the contracts with their customers, buys: paper, printers toners, electricity consumption, storage and archiving of documents as well as their transportation. We must not forget the thousands of employees and their salaries. It is also worth noting that their work is increasingly valuable (costly for the employer). HR departments will certainly confirm that there is a growing problem with finding people to work.
But let us get down to specifics. An example company has about 8 million customers, with whom it renews contracts every 2 years in about 1000 BOKs scattered around the country. Let's assume that an average agreement contains 18 pages, and in all BOKs such agreements generate 333 thousand a month. The cost of paper and printing alone is over PLN 4 million a year!
Let us go further. The annual cost of transporting paper documentation is PLN 120 000, archiving is nearly PLN 1 million. By this time, in our calculations, the costs are already over 5 million zlotys. And the employees and the cost of their work? A statistical bank clerk spends as much as 55 minutes a day on handling paper documents. In other industries it looks very similar. Assuming that one BOK employs an average of 1.5 full-time employees, employee costs related to handling paper documents in our example company amount to over PLN 7 million per year!
Even at first glance, it is clear that the annual costs associated with the traditional handling of documents in this scale of business amount to more than PLN 12 million.
Implementing a biometric signature is a one-off cost, lower than the annual cost of a paper service, and the cost of its annual maintenance is a fraction of the cost of a traditional paper service. Any company management seeing these figures should not hesitate to make a decision.
Contrary to popular belief, technology is not taking jobs away from people. Especially if there is a shortage of labour anyway. By doing away with paper contracts or the circulation of paper documents between customers and the company, employees have more time to devote to customers, explain the complexities of a contract or, most obviously, serve more of them. Customers do not like waiting in queues, and the times of ruthless price-fighting between companies are slowly coming to an end. What counts is quality. And quality also means speed of customer service. The companies that will win in the market will be those that understand this faster and implement the latest technological solutions.
Even the best employees make mistakes or omissions. After all, a printer may fail to print a page, or a customer may fail to initial one of the pages or fill in all the required fields due to the large number of sheets on his desk and the ever-present rush. These are not situations that do not happen, are they? When signing documents in the system, there is no possibility that any of the pages will not be signed. The system can also automatically check whether all required fields (e.g. consents) have been filled in.
Every employer knows that labour costs are getting higher every year. Unlike technology, which becomes more massive the cheaper it is relatively.
This is a buzzword in the IT industry, and in the case of biometric signature technology it is particularly critical. It is safe to say that with the technology used in signaturiX, it is impossible to forge a signature. The system not only collects the signature image itself, but also the signals. Even the speed with which the individual letters are written or how hard we press on the tablet when writing the individual character elements. Each signature is individual, unique and unrepeatable, like a thumbprint or retina. In addition, it expresses the will of the signatory.
Advanced cryptographic techniques used in the solution guarantee the security of this data. Someone could say that every cipher/key can be broken with a lot of computing power and enough time. This is 
. We have calculated how long it would take to break the biometric encryption mechanisms used in signaturiX using a modern computer. It can be done in over 6.4 quadrillion years. That's almost 500 times longer than the universe exists.
In addition, each signature in signaturiX is also marked with a certified timestamp, so that we can be sure exactly when it was signed. The use of biometric data, which are unique to each of us, and the encryption mechanisms used in the software increase the security level of signing documents many times over compared to the paper process.
Many experts talk about the shrinking resources of our planet. Just as emission standards have been introduced for cars, ships and cranes, paper consumption may one day be tightened or the price of paper may go so high that it is no longer economical to buy. The global market is very dynamic, volatile and unpredictable. A few years ago, it was enough for a large paper mill in Scandinavia to burn down and the price of paper in Poland immediately jumped up.
It may seem like an abstraction, but companies that think long-term, strategically and are at the forefront of the technological elite will win.
