Digital Day 2023: Discovering DocuSign and sharing Duckrow’s experience

DocuSign’s annual webinar event, Digital Day, was a big hit. You can catch-up on all the action or read on for our recap of the first session: ‘Discovering DocuSign: An introduction to our solutions’, presented by Conor Brockelsby, Commercial Manager, Small & Medium Business, DocuSign. 

Since the dawn of tech, organisations have been grappling with how to use the latest digital tools to streamline operations, boost productivity, cut costs and delight customers. In the 1980s, CRMs and ERPs exploded onto the business scene. By the twenty-first century, marketing automation and HCM systems were all the rage. 

Today, there’s still one area of business that’s ripe for digitisation. And that’s the system of agreement. 

DocuSign’s Conor Brokelsby kicked off the 2023 Digital Day event with an engaging introduction to systems of agreement. When it comes to digital transformation, Conor said, “An organisation’s system of agreement is the next big opportunity, and what I mean by that is the systems and technologies your business uses to manage agreements and agreement workflows.” 

Considering that businesses deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of agreements across both front and back office every day, there are huge opportunities to improve the way these agreements are prepared, signed, acted on and managed. “Today, your employees are collaborating to get all of this done, but they’re largely doing it manually. DocuSign helps our customers to better manage this process by delivering a modern and efficient system of agreement, all while delivering a better experience for your customers and your employees,” said Conor.

A digital system of agreement automates key stages in the agreement process, and unlocks data embedded within them for faster and more effective decision-making. Yet digitising agreements involves a lot more than simply converting a file to a PDF. “The problem with PDFs is they’re static documents, which means that rich contract data and metadata — like terms, obligations, SLA s and even simple things like product pricing — are hard to find unless you get a human involved.” 

As Conor explained, a digital platform like DocuSign’s puts the power of data into the hands of the right people to unleash the power of agreement data — which ultimately leads to better business results. And who better to explain how this power is being unleashed than one of Australia’s most exciting new start-ups, Duckrow?

Duckrow embraces digital signing over Zoom

Duckrow’s Director, Brendon Murphy, and Co-Founder, Vern Chan, joined Conor in the webinar to launch their business on the world stage. As Vern said, “You are the first audience we have announced Duckrow to publicly.” What an honour!

Previously WillHQ, Duckrow heralds an exciting evolution of the online Will business into a true digital platform. As Australia’s first fully-digital Will-making application, Durckrow enables anyone to jump onto the platform to create a digital will. The key difference with Duckrow, compared to online Will platforms, is that Duckrow also facilitates the witnessing and signing of the Will via Zoom — which is the crucial step in turning a draft into a legally-binding document. 

Duckrow solves a huge problem in the market today, which is that over half of Australians don’t have Wills. While some people simply procrastinate or put it in the too-hard basket, many people have started Wills but stall when it comes to finding witnesses. There are thousands of drafted, unsigned Wills lying around in people’s homes. Problem is, the law doesn’t recognise these un-signed, un-witnessed pieces of paper.

Enter Duckrow. Anyone can jump onto the Duckrow platform to draft a Will, fully supported by a video host who guides you through the process. Then, if you live in Victoria or NSW, where digital Wills have been legalised, you can then enter a Zoom session with two Duckrow-supplied witnesses, and sign the Will electronically using DocuSign. It is literally that easy.

For customers in other States, Duckrow is like other online Will platforms, providing a quick and easy way to generate a Will. Testators then need to print out the Will and get it signed in front of witnesses. 

As Brendon said, “DocuSign provides us with a secure, simple and streamlined integration with Zoom. Testators can eSign and then have the draft Will eWitnessed by our two authenticated witnesses. It’s the eSigning and eWitnessing that are critical to what we’re trying to do.

“We explored a number of alternatives before DocuSign launched the Zoom integration, and those were either prohibitively expensive, or vastly too complex for a B2C service.”

By using DocuSign to solve one of the key points of friction in the traditional process of creating a Will, Duckrow is making it easier and more affordable than ever for the average Australian to prepare one. “Any organisation that wants to improve their workflows or security around documentation management has to look at DocuSign. It really has enabled us to deliver. We highly recommend it,” said Brendon.

Thanks, Duckrow! For more stories about how DocuSign is helping businesses transform, watch out for the next blog in our Digital Day series or watch all the webinars on-demand now.