Theirs is a case of how the companies that develop the bulk of their business in the online environment are using electronic signatures as a basic tool, which allows for any workflow that requires a signature by a customer or supplier to be performed in entirely digitally.
However, Signaturit’s solution, characterized by its ease of use and offering the highest levels of legal coverage, can be very useful for companies of larger sizes that actually sell physical products.
This is the case of PRISA, the first mass media group in Spanish and Portuguese languages: a multinational leader in the fields of education, information and entertainment that has 60 million customers, including the readers of emblematic publications such as El Pais, Cinco Dias or AS.
The confluence of Signaturit’s technology –integrated in this case in the TBS Agora eMandatos suite– and a company of the size of PRISA, with almost 10,600 employees and which operates in 22 countries, has been precisely produced to provide a digital solution to the problem that the news division of the multinational is facing: the standardization at the EU level of the functioning of transfers and direct debits.
This process, called the SEPA Regulation (its acronym means Single European Payments Area) is currently in force since February 1st, 2014. Because of it, PRISA Noticias needs to request all new subscribers to sign the SEPA mandate, to comply with the new harmonized regulation. This regulation affects the 27 members of the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway and Switzerland, and the deadline to complete the process established by the legislation is February 1st, 2016.
For practical purposes, this regulatory change has required PRISA to request around 12,500 signatures a year, under the risk that those non-formalized signatures could give rise to the repayment of bank receipts or the banks not authorizing the bank payment orders from subscribers.
To meet this challenge, PRISA had to deploy a massive operation of shipping and manual collection of signatures: slow, inefficient, subject to losses, very intensive in resources and time, and above all, very uncomfortable for the subscribers.
By realizing the inefficiency and the costs of manual processing, PRISA Noticias decided to undertake the process of adapting to the SEPA regulations by relying on Signaturit, integrated in this case with the TBS Agora eMandatos module.
While the benefits are obvious, the development of the solution has required a delicate adaptation to three commercial systems and seven different information systems, all present in the different division workflows. Thanks to the comprehensive collaborative effort between the teams of TBS and Signaturit, this difficult task was completed in just five months.
After the project’s implementation, the request of SEPA mandates from PRISA Noticias to its subscribers went from manually creating the mandates --by entering the required data by SEPA, printing all the created mandates, sending them by mail-- to instead a digital, automatic, fast, effective and much less expensive (in time and resources) process, with greater assurance and much easier to complete for PRISA Noticias clients.
EL PAIS’ subscribers, as of today, can receive an email from the publication with just a click of a button. By pressing it, subscribers can sign their SEPA mandate from any device (smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop ...) with only a tap of their finger, a stylus or a mouse, without having to sign up for any services, downloading any apps or accessing a third party website.
The collected signatures in digital format are also 100% legal under the strict European electronic signatures legislation, whose details are addressed in a previous post.
In short, the use of Signaturit has saved PRISA quite a considerable amount of resources. Above all, the uncertainty about its ability to fulfill on time the SEPA Regulation and the risk of losing a considerable number of subscribers on the road.
This is therefore a success story with a result similar to Nubelo, but from a very different position: that of a multinational with thousands of employees which, in the case of the News division, mainly sells a physical product. Their situation exposes the versatility and the benefits of using electronic signatures for companies of all sizes, whatever the industry.
Would you like your business or company to also enjoy the same benefits? Call us at +34 935 511 481 or send us an email to sepa@signaturit.com and adapt yourself as soon as possible to the SEPA Regulation with Signaturit.
