The Matthew effect is intensifying, and the giants are entering the market. How will the electronic signature industry develop in the future?
Learn,e signed the ant to receive 650 million C round of financing, this round of financing by ant gold Leading the investment, Gobi Capital and the old shareholder Jingya Capital followed suit. This financing will be used to increase product upgrades and developments and talent introduction, as well as the application of AI technology in every aspect of smart contracts.
e signing treasure said that this round of investment ant ant Jinfu is a global third-party payment service platform, from payment service to life service, serving 1.2 billion users worldwide, the main scene of service coverage – finance and credit, is also The main business areas of e-signing. After this round of financing, e-signing will cooperate with Ant Financial to cover a large number of 2C, 2B and 2G scenarios and accelerate the popularization of electronic contract services.
The last round of financing of e-signing was the 150-billion-yuan B-round financing in January 2018, which was led by Qianhai Wutong and cleared and controlled Ginkgo. Earlier, e-signal was also awarded the 10 million Pre-A round of the prime capital and excellent investment in early 2015. In December 2016, it won the A-round financing of the Oriental Fuhai, the control of Ginkgo and the investment of 45 million yuan.
The electronic signature industry cuts into various scenarios that require signatures, such as contract signing. In the past, signing paper contracts between enterprises required to be transmitted by mail, etc. For both companies with a lot of customer relationships, both time and labor costs are very high. However, the development of Internet technology and digital signature technology has laid the foundation for this entrepreneurial direction.
e signing treasure is one of the earliest startups in the electronic signature industry in China. At the beginning of its establishment in 2002, the company released the “Tianjin Signature System V1.0”, focusing on the direction of the paperless signature system. At that time, the domestic Internet industry still stayed in the software age. The Tianyin signature product form was also an electronic signature of software and hardware integration. It provided services based on local clients and built a dedicated call center to provide after-sales support. In terms of commercial landing, it first cuts into the government sector and quickly realizes profitability.
The successful transition from a software service provider to a SaaS platform is an important step for e-signing. In 2013, e signed Baoshun cloud computing, mobile Internet and other trends, chose Shangyun, launched the electronic signature SaaS platform “e-signing treasure”, based on API to provide customers with electronic signatures to contract management, from deposit guarantee to legal services. Full lifecycle service. That is to say, the electronic signature service that must be verified and deployed on the local side in the past can now be completed online, the platform can trace the whole process, and the business model changes from the traditional project system to the pay-per-view Sa.aS mode.
In this period, the number of users of e-tags has exploded, accumulating users in multiple industries. In addition to serving traditional finance, the Internet, the government, including traditional large-scale manufacturing, logistics and other industries, e-sign has also opened up new economic fields including online education, online rental, online travel, online education, as the infrastructure Industry growth.
Afterwards, e-tag has opened up the whole ecological upstream and downstream from 2016, providing not only contract services, but also legal services such as smart contracts, access certificates and online arbitration, and supports private cloud, public cloud and hybrid cloud. Formal deployment. As of June 2019, e-signing has signed a total of 7.5 billion, with 210 million individual users and 2.89 million enterprise users, with an average daily signing of over 20 million.
Electronic Signature IndustrySince 2013, has become active. With the large-scale application of Internet finance, the industry has developed rapidly and gradually expanded into other fields. At the beginning of the industry, no fewer than a dozen or even 100 startups have entered this market.Step by stepFrom the germination period to the current high-speed development period . Most of the players are against the US electronic signature giant DocuSign – DocuSign was founded in 2003. Also focusing on electronic signatures and e-contract services, the company was listed in the US in April 2018 and currently has a market capitalization of $11.7 billion.
It has been reported many times that the barriers of this industry should start from the two-way nature of electronic signatures – signatures are two-way behaviors, so if a large customer with a large customer relationship uses an electronic signature platform, its partners are easily attracted. On this platform, and gradually transmitted to the partner’s trade relationship, once the network is formed, it will be difficult to break. Therefore, the head customer is an important target for electronic signature companies. At present, e-signal has also served benchmark customers such as Alibaba, Sony, Hua Xia Bank, Hikvision, Geely, Budweiser, and Dingxin Group. The customer ecology that can be extended to the strategic cooperation with Ali is also worthy of attention.
In addition, electronic signatures are closely related to the business, and adaptation to the industry and business is an important barrier, and it is also decided whether to sink into more industries. For example, the requirements of customers such as the government and large enterprises are more complicated, involving the fine-grained requirements of organizational structure management, seal management, authorization management, and intelligent editing. For these industries, e-sign has a special solution.
However, the electronic signature industry has evolved to the presentA round of shuffling and integration, industry echelon has been formed. From 2017 to 2018, it is the watershed of the electronic signature industry. Up to now, enterprises including e-signing, Shangshang, and Dafa have basically stabilized the first echelon. The market is still broad and the policy continues to improve. The “Electronic Commerce Law of the People’s Republic of China” was officially implemented in January this year. The regulations make clear provisions on the use of electronic contracts, which means that more new scenes are worth exploring in the future.
In addition, the industry Matthew effect is more significant. Since 2018, the investment and financing events in the electronic signature industry have been dominated by head enterprises. In 2019, Tencent and Ali’s entry made the industry’s resource tendencies more obvious. The head enterprises continued to run wild, fine-grained operations and scratched the head. Customers, opening up new areas and scenarios are key words for the future.
When the industry map is clear, how does e-signing consider future development strategies? For this, e signing co-founder and vice president Zhang Jin once defined 2018 as “the first year of e-signature popular service”, that is, as more and more users accept e-signs, The “flow bonus” of this industry will gradually erupt and become popular. The willingness of small and medium-sized customers to pay will be strengthened, and customers will gradually develop from large enterprises to small and medium-sized enterprises and even individuals, forming network synergies.
Therefore, e-signing will focus on opening the signing channels of B2C and C2C in the future, providing consumer-grade products, promoting the use of enterprises with the good experience of individual users, and attracting consumption through product-driven, thus establishing enterprise-level Cloud platform and ecosystem closed loop. On the other hand, the blessing of technology is also an important strategy for the future e-signing. At present, e-Sign has released the “Smart Contract Strategy”, which means that the signing and management review of contracts is more convenient through AI technology and legal related services.