The handwritten electronic signature is the easiest and most popular method in situations where the contractual partners are in the same location to complete contracts in a paperless, comfortable, and fast way. Possible use cases are off-site maintenance or consultations, in bank branches, agencies, workshops, travel agencies, or collection or delivery of goods.
In addition to excellent user-friendliness, the security of the hardware and software used to capture and process electronic signatures also play a major role. The following requirements must be observed:

1. If required, a handwriting expert must be able to assign the captured signatures to the signatory for evidential proceedings.

• Signature pads are specifically developed and therefore, best suited for this purpose.  
• Tablets, notebooks and laptops with an active pen often also offer a high capture quality. The active pen offers both comfortable handling without interference from the palm of the hand, as well as the correspondingly high sampling rate for speed and capture of the pressure pattern via the active pen of the captured signatures.

--> Examples of such "active pens" are the Apple Pencil, the Samsung S-Pen, as well as various active pens of "touch-capable" Windows devices with the pen included in the scope of delivery.

2. The encrypted transmission and secure, inseparable linking of the signature (identification feature) with the document and the associated integrity protection against subsequent changes must be ensured. You can recognise a secure environment, if:

• An application / app from a well-known and established provider of e-signatures or a secure / verified system provided by your company is used for signing.
• You can check and validate signed documents with Adobe Reader for subsequent changes (the display of an exclamation mark is not critical here, but the norm. However, the sentence "The document was not changed or damaged after the certification was applied" must appear in the signature properties).

3. Additional requirements worth noting:

• Self-protection (in the legal sense) of the operator must be guaranteed. This means that the operator himself must not be able to decrypt the biometric data of the signature or extract it from the signed PDF file in such a way that he can use it to sign another document. Otherwise, the operator would not be able to prove that the signer actually intended to sign this specific document, due to the burden of proof analogous to paper documents with wet-ink signatures.
• The signing of revision-proof PDF documents such as PDF/A must be ensured in order to guarantee that the signed electronic document can still be opened and read for many years to come.

If you wish to receive more information about our signature software, please contact our Team for detailed information, we will be happy to assist you!