Adoption of e-signatures started slowly at the turn of the 21st century, but in the past 5 years it has dramatically accelerated to near ubiquity in most industries. However, in the quarter century history of e-signatures, one thing hasn’t changed: the signing experience. The experience expectation is one where e-signatures are online, PDF based, and “owned” by the underlying e-signature provider(meaning heavy branding by the e-signature provider). When Anvil released our embedded e-signature product, we gave companies the ability to control the branding while seamlessly integrating e-signatures directly into their application. Today we build upon these advanced electronic signature features with the release of Etch Interactive Signing.
Connecting Web Forms and PDF E-Signatures
Unlike simple e-sign platforms, Anvil is designed to help organizations move off of PDFs and documents, and reorient towards the underlying data underpinning the document. Workflows is the ultimate example of how we help companies thrive by being data-first rather than document first. With Workflows, we give anyone the ability to build web forms that dynamically capture structured and validated data which is then used to generate completed PDF forms. By orienting work around webforms instead of PDFs, our customers unlock data from static documents, allowing for greater digital automation. However, in many situations, a full blown Anvil Workflow is overkill for a simple signature process with just a couple of data fields. We needed a product to bridge the gap between a fully web-first experience vs the familiarity of a PDF-based process.
So we asked ourselves: how do we preserve the data-first orientation of Anvil while giving product teams the ability to easily launch PDF based e-signature experiences directly in their applications?
Enter Interactive Signing, a simple way to collect information from signers as they complete an e-sign request.
Interactive Signing has some strong advantages over traditional e-signing, including:
- Signers get a mobile friendly web experience
- Signers are guided through each field requiring their attention on the PDF
- Fields can be configured to accept pre-populated data, be overwritten, or require signer input.
- Data for each field is kept in a machine readable format, separate from the underlying PDF.
The last advantage of Interactive Singing is particularly powerful.By keeping the data separate and structured, it future proofs your organization from disruptive new technologies like AI. Imagine being able to augment existing AI agents by querying your own data that has been freed from PDFs.
Improving Workflows with Advanced E-Sign Platform
Anvil’s Interactive Signing is an advanced e-sign feature that gives users the familiarity of a document based interface while upleveling the experience with true web form fields, built-in validation, and data formatting. It’s a great feature for documents that require simple data collection alongside signatures, and the experience is instantly recognizable to anyone that has ever e-signed a document.
If your needs go beyond simple data collection like calculations, dynamic fields and logic, Anvil Workflows is a great option. Or if you already have the data and just need to generate / sign documents, check out our PDF Services and our standard Etch features. When it comes to digitizing document workflows, Anvil Document SDK is the fastest way to build software for paperwork.