A Link to Better Contract Management: How Unissoft’s iNAS SmartContract solution utilizes BlockChain technology to enable greater efficiency, transparency, and security across the contract signing process
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Potential pitfalls of traditional eSignature solutions
eSignature solutions have been a well-understood part of the technology landscape for years, with industry leaders such as DocuSign becoming so ubiquitous that their brand doubles as a sobriquet for eSignature services all-up. Despite this, many customers, particularly those associated with banking and government industries, retain paper-based documentation policies–policies they are required to maintain to satisfy legal guidelines and to remain compliant with regional or national regulations.
For customers like ASM Pacific Technology Ltd. (ASM), the process of creating and maintaining paper copies of necessary contract information had quickly become a drain on their operational capacity. ASM, listed in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 1989, has been using a supply chain management solution since 1990. Using this solution, ASM was developing an average of 29 documents from each purchase order (PO)–a number that quickly became unmanageable when processing roughly 2000 POs per year.
To comply with regional regulations, customers using traditional document management and archiving solutions must retain original signed documents as legal copies to present in court–paying in time and resources to convey the document between companies and to eventually store the original version.
Secure, compliant, mobile-friendly document signage powered by BlockChain
Unissoft’s iNAS SmartContract solution was developed to solve this problem. The application–developed on Xamarin–provides customers with a cross-platform, mobile-first eSignature solution backstopped by the power of BlockChain technology for security.
Unissoft’s solution uses Etherium BlockChain technology for its contract verification services. The BlockChain functions as a public ledger, housed and shared by all network participants, with records of all transactions executed using the solution. Once recorded, this information can only be altered by an agreement from a majority of those participating in the network, making unauthorized changes nearly impossible to execute.
Unissoft’s solution takes advantage of this technology by generating a small, unique identifier for any contract developed using their solution. This identifier is stored in the public BlockChain, allowing users of the solution to authenticate contract documents against the public identifier. Unissoft’s solution stores only the unique identifier on the public BlockChain, storing the actual body of the contract on the customer’s private Azure. The result is a secure and transparent solution that is decentralized, preventing single sources of failure that could be exploited by hackers.
“We do not keep centralized contract data for our customers on any servers. We only keep the hash that verifies our customers’ contracts authenticity on the public BlockChain. There are a number of benefits to this but the largest is security–our solution avoids a single point of failure and even in the case of a hack affecting our company, our customers would be entirely unaffected.” – Aldous Ng, CEO, Unissoft