When Michael Ball invites clients to call him on his cell if they have any questions, he means it. Even if it’s on the weekend and a bank client wants to bounce around ideas for speeding up loan applications.

That’s exactly what happened in the Spring 2020, when the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) announced its Personal Protection Program (PPP). Aimed at struggling businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, it sent companies scrambling to apply for PPP loans before the limited federal funding ran out.

As Senior Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at IMM, Ball knew his company’s digital transaction solutions, specifically designed for financial institutions, were key to helping banks and credit unions meet this moment.

Banks and credit unions are key providers of SBA loans. Most had never handled such a large volume of applications from their business banking customers in such a short time. With the help of Ball and the IMM team, IMM’s clients were able to turn the PPP loan application into an online web form, expediting the process.

For the requisite applicant signatures, IMM offers its customers remote electronic signature services through an OEM agreement as part of the Adobe Acrobat Sign Embed Program. The program lets IMM use Adobe Acrobat Sign APIs to embed trusted, highly secure, and reliable e-signature capabilities within IMM’s digital document and transaction solutions.

“During the pandemic, when many loan applicants needed to sign documents remotely, embedding Adobe Acrobat Sign helped make IMM’s offerings extremely compelling to credit unions and banks. They recognized these features could help more small businesses get the PPP funds they desperately needed very quickly,” says Ball.

By offering loan applicants a higher degree of self-service and automation, including convenient web form e-signing from anywhere on any device, one of IMM’s client institutions was able to quickly process all incoming PPP loan applications with remote e-signatures.

“The client told me they couldn’t have hired enough people to try to manually process that volume. They couldn’t have done it without the solution offered through IMM and Adobe,” Ball says.

First Community Credit Union, the largest credit union in Missouri, debuted IMM’s Web Forms to Workflow functionality, including remote e-signing, to its more than 345,000 members in 2020. “When credit union members can’t get to a branch lobby, they can access the forms they need on demand and e-sign from home, their workplace, or wherever they may be. It eliminates a lot of paper and makes the process more efficient for the member and the credit union alike,” says Ball. Unsurprisingly, remote digital transactions completed by members soon leapt 300%.

Across its client base, IMM saw remote e-signature volume more than double during the peak months of the pandemic and remains approximately 67% above pre-pandemic levels.

Why IMM chose the Adobe Acrobat Sign Embed Program

When Ball first joined IMM, less than 200 clients were taking advantage of remote e-signing. At the time, IMM had just started its Embed partner relationship for Acrobat Sign, replacing an alternative electronic signature vendor.

“As our business grew, the sophistication and requirements that our clients were seeking outpaced what our prior e-signature vendor could provide. A high-friction security approach made the signing experience incredibly cumbersome for the consumer. Our clients clamored for a change,” recalls Ball.

IMM conducted a full vetting of a number of e-signature providers. The company needed an e-signing product it could embed and integrate within its robust digital solution platform, allowing IMM to present the desired remote signing features through its own carefully designed user experience and functionality, tailored for financial institutions.

Compliance with the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and the ESIGN Act was a must. At the same time, IMM sought to balance stringent security requirements to fortify customer trust with a friendlier user experience. Acrobat Sign met all of IMM’s requirements and more.

IMM embeds Acrobat Sign in its platform specifically for remote e-signature situations. When a signatory cannot appear in person at a bank branch, the bank can use IMM’s solution to send digital documents for e-signing remotely on the signatory’s preferred device. The solution offers flexibility, taking advantage of Acrobat Sign premium options for two-factor phone authentication, knowledge-based authentication (KBA), or government ID authentication.

“Having the appropriate security surrounding authentication was incredibly important. The audit trails are critical because we're dealing with financial documents tied to assets, so we need to make sure transactions are enforceable with verified e-signatures,” Ball says.

A partnership that pays dividends

Ball credits the outstanding user experience and continual improvements in Acrobat Sign for contributing to the strong overall impressions of IMM’s solutions. “A friendly user interface is paramount to our strategy of helping clients deliver the best possible customer experiences to banking customers,” says Ball.

IMM includes event statuses from Acrobat Sign within its user experience. When a document is viewed or signed, or when an event is cancelled, the statuses are updated in IMM’s monitoring and reporting tools. The IMM application sends notification messages to the administrator for the e-signing workflow, providing a consistent experience for the financial institution employees who use IMM’s solutions.

Adobe helps IMM meet evolving client needs with opportunities for product development influence and roadmap visibility as an Acrobat Sign ISV partner. In turn, IMM markets new features to its clients to solve their immediate business problems.

One it often promotes is Mega Sign, which makes it easy to send a form to multiple people with one “Send” click. IMM’s clients use this bulk sending tool to meet regulatory requirements, for example every year when all bank employees need to electronically sign the bank’s security policy. Clients appreciate the tremendous time savings for their staff, who use the tool to streamline coordinating and tracking signature completions.

“As an OEM/Embedded partner for Adobe Acrobat Sign, we enjoy an expanded set of digital offerings that amplify the value of the enterprise solution we deliver to our clients. We appreciate the ongoing innovation, including new convenience and security-minded features that Adobe allows us to natively integrate to our platform,” Ball says.

At Hughes Federal Credit Union in Arizona, remote e-signatures now dominate loan signings. The IMM client reports that 90 percent of centralized lending credit cards and 50 percent of centralized lending non-credit card loans are processed with the help of remote digital signatures.

“The addition of IMM’s remote e-signature capabilities has enabled the credit union to now average only 120 minutes for lending-associated processes. As a result, Hughes FCU has a higher closure rate and has increased its direct lending volume, seeing 20 percent loan growth in the first six months following implementation,” Hughes FCU reports.

More banks and credit unions are hearing about the benefits of working with IMM, pushing its monthly volume of remote e-signatures through Acrobat Sign into the millions. With its increasingly popular solutions, IMM has seen 14x growth in its client base over the past nine years, including more than 300% revenue growth in the past five years.

“We want our clients to get the most value out of our product because we know it builds long-term, sustainable partnerships that fuel a business like ours over the years. That's why we continue to grow and prosper,” says Ball.

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