South Africa-founded digital signature solutions company SigniFlow has announced its first distributor agreement in Australia, with IT firm Bluechip Infotech. It is an early win for SigniFlow, with regional headquarters in Melbourne, which continues to cement its footprint down under and capitalise on its Asia-Pacific and Africa-centric ambitions.

Founded in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2013, SigniFlow has a presence in over 50 countries worldwide, with Australia now included, under the leadership of Asia Pacific sales director David Saunders.

According to Saunders, the company has experienced a massive upswing in demand for digital signature technologies within the Australian and New Zealand markets. This has been primarily driven by hard lockdowns that have seen staff working for extended periods, which brings about the need to sign remotely.

“The digital signature market within these countries is still in the growth phase. We expect this market to grow substantially within the short to mid-term. SigniFlow has signed distribution agreements with three multinational IT distributors who are contracted to distribute SigniFlow to approximately 40,000 resellers located across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines,” Suanders said.

SigniFlow will concentrate on fulfilling the demand originating from these key partners before exploring other distribution agreements, he added.

Bluechip will distribute SigniFlow’s electronic signature solutions to 9 000 partners across the region.

Bluechip sales director Ron Jarvis says SigniFlow’s digital signature and workflow technology will be instrumental in helping businesses to go fully digital, not only to cope with current circumstances, but also to future-proof processes and increase efficiencies.

“SigniFlow’s software services (will give our partners) a solution that improves business processes and operations through the help of digital signature technology that is compliant with global electronic signature law,” said Jarvis.

Group CIO of SigniFlow Leon van der Merwe said the company’s international expansion into Asia Pacific, UK and Europe has been via a subsidiary structure, where the stakeholders in each region have direct interest in the business.

“This ensures commitment and has been the driving force behind our phenomenal growth abroad. To extend on our reach and market penetration, the subsidiaries then in turn negotiate local distribution and reseller partnerships in each country. Resellers and distribution partners are carefully chosen and vetted to ensure only the highest level of quality service, experience, and expertise down the value chain.”

SigniFlow has acknowledged that in addition to lockdown-driven working conditions, the impact of information management regulation GDPR and POPI has given impetus to the company’s established datacentre network.

Van der Merwe adds: “SigniFlow has two components to consider, one being privacy laws and the other being electronic signature laws in each country and/or region. To achieve this, we have eight segregated datacentres scattered across the world, each servicing specific privacy requirements per region. To further extend on this, customer can go one step further by localising our software in their own datacentre, behind their firewall to ensure documents and data never reach the cloud. Each regional instance is also integrated to local identity providers and signature certificate providers to ensure compliance with local signature legislation. Australia is no different with its own infrastructure locally in our Australian datacentre, servicing Australian customers only.”

According to its website, SigniFlow is exclusively distributed in Africa by PBSA and is headquartered in Gauteng. It lists Cybertech and Monday Cloud-Docfusion as local South African partners.