Created in 2008, Bitcoin was the first implementation of Blockchain technology. Since its launch, a slew of other apps has emerged, aiming to capitalize on the digital ledger’s principles and capabilities.
Blockchain is a game-changing concept, having a direct impact on various industries. However, there are risks associated with it. Technology, implementation, investment, and others directly or indirectly associated with blockchain might all pose hazards.
No matter how big or little, almost every business field relies on sensitive documents. For improved digital documentation security and maintenance, many enterprises rely on the adaptive and user-friendly platform of ZorroSign, Inc .
Shamsh Hadi, Co-founder, and CEO of ZorroSign, Inc, states, “ZorroSign’s tamper-proof solution uses blockchain technology to ensure the privacy and security of your digital documents with an immutable audit trail and chain of custody for your digital transactions.”
Insights Success caught up with Shamsh in our attempt to find “10 Most Innovative FinTech Solution Providers in 2022” and talked in-depth about ZorroSign.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Give us a brief overview/inception of ZorroSign, its mission, and the key aspects of its strong foothold in the Workflow Automation industry.
My company’s multi-chain blockchain platform integrates digital signatures, AI/ML, identity-as-a-service (or IDaaS), and patented fraud prevention to ensure user authentication and document verification for legally enforceable digital transactions.
ZorroSign was founded to move from a trust-based to a truth-based solution. We strive to have a positive impact on the environment by implementing sustainable practices and securely transforming paper-based workflows to digital, decreasing costs, reducing errors, and increasing productivity.
Describe your top-notch solutions, and what makes your company a preferred choice among your clientele over other competitors?
ZorroSign’s blockchain platform helps people build, sign, store, and track their mission-critical documents on the blockchain. By using distributed ledger technologies, ZorroSign provides superior privacy and security. This offers peace of mind for digital transactions and helps to avoid fraud and compliance issues. ZorroSign utilizes web3 technologies to unite digital signatures, AI/ML, IDaaS, and patented fraud prevention, delivering the future of digital transactions to governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals today.
My company is constantly adding strategic integrations and collaborating with prospects and customers to ensure its multi-chain blockchain platform is easy-to-use and frictionless with other software solutions. Our users gain industry-leading privacy and security compliance to many international standards and regulations.
What are the primary objectives and philosophy of ZorroSign?
At ZorroSign, the company’s primary objective—its vision—is to provide the most trusted, secure and legally compliant paperless experience to organizations, companies, and individuals worldwide by using disruptive web3 technologies. As CEO and co-founder, I have dedicated my career to advancing technology while simultaneously advancing sustainability, ensuring the new technologies I bring to market also elevate information privacy, data security, and data democratization. The web3 internet is built on blockchain and similarly aspires to greater privacy, greater democratization, and greater sustainability for users . . . breaking the centralized and monopolistic model of web2’s Big Tech.
With this philosophy, ZorroSign designed a digital signature platform from the ground up based on blockchain—delivering a solution to an eSignature market where competitors are locked into old architecture and legacy software. Carrying the torch of my vision through ZorroSign’s development team in Sri Lanka, the company has unified digital signatures on a blockchain platform that ensures user authentication and document validation via identity-as-a-service technologies and a patented fraud prevention solution called Z-Forensics. This unique solution set pulls digital signatures into the future—providing digital transactions in the universe or metaverse with an immutable and legally enforceable chain-of-custody.
What are your top-notch offerings that have a strong foothold in the industry?
ZorroSign’s multi-chain blockchain platform is the company’s flagship solution. Originally built on private, permissioned Hyperledger Fabric, ZorroSign has recently added public, permissionless Provenance Blockchain to the platform and has a roadmap to adding additional distributed ledger technologies. This unique combination of public and private blockchain solutions, consolidated on a single platform, delivers all the cryptographical strengths of blockchain endpoint security while also distributing the data set in an architecture that helps mitigate the risks of phishing and ransomware attacks.
Our emphasis on privacy and security for digital signatures and digital transactions gives ZorroSign a strong foothold in industries as diverse as education and government, financial services, healthcare, IT, legal services, real estate, and more. By providing a mobile solution for digital signatures, ZorroSign facilitates digital transactions and the opportunity for organizations, companies, and individual to “go green” with paperless operations.
Geographically, the United Arab Emirates has been a strong early market for ZorroSign, not least because the Hadi family has made a home in Dubai for over fifty years. But ZorroSign’s global footprint readily expands to India and Sri Lanka, and in 2020, the company opened a U.S. headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.
What are the roadblocks that ZorroSign faces in the ever-changing landscape of the business world?
While blockchain (as a technology) makes headlines via bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency crashes, web3 solutions for businesses are lost in the noise. The recent financial market tumult has analysts, journalists, and editors wary of spotlighting good news in crypto, which makes promoting blockchain solutions difficult against the head winds of the current market.
That said, ZorroSign has been fortunate to find both early adopters (ready to gain the advantages of web3 technologies again web2 competitors) and organizations knowledgeable on the future of the internet and how blockchain-based apps can improve data privacy, security, and democratization. For those forward-thinking government agencies, corporations, small businesses, and individuals, ZorroSign is the only digital signature solution that bridges their operational needs of today with their vision for improved customer experiences tomorrow. It is certainly a longer sales cycle—messaging and educating financial service organizations, legal departments and firms, IT companies, and others on the long-term benefits of blockchain-based solutions—but ZorroSign has the technology stack to win them over and prove the value of web3 for their businesses, constituents, and customers. Bringing new technologies to market always requires taking chances and carving new paths, and the roadblocks we face are readily navigated when you can deliver what you promise.
How is your ZorroSign adapting to market orientation?
We take a blue ocean approach to the market, not just differentiating ourselves from legacy digital signature technologies, but opening up new opportunities for conducting business, government, or personal transactions in our increasingly digital world.
We saw a need in the market to push past web2 solutions for digital signatures and digital transactions, escaping centralized databases and information architectures that consolidate data with a provider—leaving centralized data at risk to cyber-attacks and pulling data ownership away from users to be housed and monetized by the web2 provider. ZorroSign empowers our users by deploying web3 solutions that decentralize data and allow users to always own and access their documents and transaction metadata—even after their subscriptions end.
Further, we also saw an opportunity to break from unsophisticated per-seat pricing models, and instead meet market demand with more control over data and corresponding costs. ZorroSign launched consumptionbased pricing for our software subscriptions late last year: Allowing Individual subscriptions to be priced by set numbers of documents or unlimited document sets, while Business subscriptions are custom priced by number of needed users, signers, and document sets. And our Enterprise subscriptions are priced granularly by users and documents used, so users never pay for unused licenses or consumption.
Describe in detail the work culture and the values that drive your organization’s services.
ZorroSign aspires to provide our customers with the world’s most secure and trusted digital platform in their transformation to a paperless life. We leverage disruptive technologies to make our customers’ lives and businesses more secure and private while making ZorroSign the global standard for a trusted partner in paperless transactions.
ZorroSign attracts the best talent available, always encouraging teamwork, collaboration, and a spirit of innovation to solve businesses’ toughest problems while promoting ZorroSign’s core principles and values. We place the needs of the customer first while continuously pursuing excellence in product development and market execution. We enable our business, employees, stakeholders, customers, and community to prosper. And strive to make a difference by planting trees, reducing water consumption, and lessening the carbon footprint.
In what traditions is your company contributing to the communities?
ZorroSign prioritizes sustainability in all our business operations and development, contributing to our communities and participating in environmental conservation through three key initiatives:
First, our web3 technologies enable a paperless life! Each time you use ZorroSign to digitally transact instead of printing, faxing, scanning, and shipping documents to collect signatures, you save trees and water, plus reduce our carbon emissions, while your organization saves time and money with digital operations.
Second, ZorroSign has partnered with One Tree Planted and is a proud sponsor of Million Tree Challenge: California’s most recent drought saw low precipitation combine with record high temperatures which has resulted in dramatically increased tree mortality and large, severe wildfires. Now, a record 129 million trees need to be restored in California, and ZorroSign is partnering in that replanting effort.
Third, our technology and customer base drive our “Save a Tree, Plant a Tree” program, whereby ZorroSign will plant a tree on behalf of our customers every time they save 8,000 pages of copy paper. One tree produces roughly 8,000 pages of copy paper and studies show that by just eliminating or reducing the use of paper, we can realize significant environmental benefits like conserving water, reducing carbon emissions, improving air quality, and reducing deforestation. ZorroSign provides users with a tracker in our app to see the paper they have saved and the new trees they have “sponsored” for planting with their paperless operations.
Undeniably, technology is playing a significant role in almost every sector. How are you leveraging technological advancements to make your solutions resourceful?
ZorroSign is built on web3 principles and technologies, starting with a foundation of private, permitted Hyperledger Fabric that aids in minimizing not only its own carbon footprint but the carbon footprint of businesses and individuals which implement ZorroSign.
Our team is adding new blockchains, now with public, permissionless Provenance Blockchain, to expand its platform and securely manage the privacy and security of its users’ digital documents. ZorroSign aspires to advance technology and sustainability for legally compliant and environmentally conscious digital transactions.
If given a chance, what change would your company like to bring in the document security industry?
Security has been a hot topic within document management, but a key component of true security is a superior level of trust to be effective. ZorroSign has restored the missing element of trust and peace of mind into the equation. Blockchain user authentication systems are secure, but ZorroSign is the only company that offers a multi-blockchain platform to secure, track, and manage your digital signatures and documentation. While our platform is a product of 21st-century technology and our team is steadfast in providing security, ZorroSign delivers it to you in a user-friendly platform, all while restoring trust in relationships.
What, according to you, could be the next big change in the Document Management System? How is ZorroSign preparing to be a part of that change?
It is true that blockchain is integrating into our lives daily. You see it everywhere, implemented by real estate, healthcare, financial services, legal, government industries, and more. Blockchain-based document management not only protects their operations but their client’s/constituents’ information as well. The new normal is evolving to be inclusive and accessible for every size of business to have streamlined, simplified, and secure document management, aiding in their growth and success.
ZorroSign delivers an easily accessible, user-friendly document management platform offering integrations into the services your organization already utilizes while making the implementation seamless and continuously improving its multi-blockchain to maximize your privacy and security.
What are ZorroSign’s future aspirations? What strategies are you undertaking to achieve those goals?
ZorroSign’s web3 platform provides emerging IDaaS capabilities through a patented Z-Forensics token, plus fraud prevention, user authentication, and document verification. It already includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) features to automate form completion for digital documents and can improve regulatory compliance across global standards for legally enforceable digital signatures.
In adding Provenance Blockchain—which reduces the need for third-party intermediation, drastically reducing costs and freeing up capital in financial transactions—our platform promotes greater transparency and liquidity for financial service organizations and allows for new kinds of financial engineering and business opportunities. Such benefits readily map to healthcare services, IT services, legal services, and real estate transactions, where the company hopes to further prove its technology’s value.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into Digital Transaction Management?
The world we live in is constantly changing and evolving rapidly. As you work to build your company, you should always be forward-thinking and ready to adapt to the new demands and needs of your customers, whether it be redesigning your product or adopting new underlying technologies.
As you set out to build your company, you should also be conscious of the impact on the world it will have, the consumption of natural resources, and the damage to existing environmental and social ecosystems. Your advancements may be the solution to problems, but they should not come at the expense of future generations.
The Good Deeds
“Aga Khan Foundation USA mobiles funds across the United States for some of the most remote, hard-to-reach part of Asia and Africa to improve the quality of life—we build hospitals and schools. We have a very large volunteer team with skills in communications, fundraising, finance, and event logistics. Since ZorroSign was introduced to AKFUSA, it has dramatically cut down the approval time for processing a check to a vendor or getting a contract approved. It saves us from receiving multiple emails and prevents any confusion about which contains the final contract in the email. ZorroSign is a friendly user interface, easy to use, and saves a lot of time and paper.”
– Leroy Fernandes, Manager of Donor Services, Aga Khan Foundation, an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network
“We were looking for a solution for our firm to obtain clients’ electronic signatures on documents in a verifiable manner. After speaking to several different companies that offered this service, ZorroSign was the most cost effective, thorough, and best product out there to meet the needs of our law firm. Especially during these times of social distancing and many clients only having access to smart phones at home, it allowed us to obtain signatures, process documents more quickly, and get results for our clients in a more timely manner. I would recommend ZorroSign to any other legal practice!”
– Rex L. Patterson, Attorney at Law, Patterson Law, LLC
“As a clinical research organization, VCS uses ZorroSign as an extremely traceable and secure method for capturing signature authorizations from our test subjects. ZorroSign provides a significant cost savings due to time related efficiencies. With our staff less focused on menial signature chasing, we can prioritize internal workflows and customer service. This helps us to save time and also provides additional added value behind the scenes.”
– Brian Ecclefield, Founder, Validated Claim Support