DRS Data & Research Services : Capturing Consent for Loan Applications With a Single Click

On the surface, the ‘I agree’ button on clickwrap agreementsseems pretty straightforward-all customers need to do is click a button or check a box to express their consent. For organizations, however, managing these standard, non-negotiable, and often high-volume agreements can be quite complex. In fact, organizations who don’t have the proper clickwrap processes and solutions in place can open themselves up to legal risk, such as class action lawsuits or loss of intellectual property. This is increasingly important as more and more customers engage with your business online – it’s vital to capture and document consent to your terms-and-conditions, privacy policy, terms-of-use, and more to protect your business. That’s why our customers, such as American First Finance, are using the DocuSign Agreement Cloud to modernize their agreement processes, enhance their customer experience, and mitigate legal risk.

Digitizing agreements at American First Finance

American First Finance Inc. is a consumer financial services company with a unique business model, offering lease-to-own and retail installment sale agreements, and servicing loans originated by a third-party bank. Over the past few years, American First Finance has been rapidly growing and expanding their sales teams; thus, investing in their infrastructure to scale and support growth has been a key company initiative. Their legal team also wanted to minimize their legal risk and exposure while the business improved their online and retail customer experiences. They traditionally had manual processes when it came to creating, reviewing and negotiating our agreements and contracts, but have taken strides in digitizing and automating their business with the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.

A new solution for clickwrap agreements

DocuSign Click was a natural next step in their Agreement Cloud journey. American First Finance was previously using a proprietary clickwrap solution to capture customer consent to their standard terms, but the proprietary solution had several limitations. They needed a new clickwrap solution to help with version control, documenting evidence of consent, and storing data in their proprietary system of record. That’s where DocuSign Clickcomes in. Click is an easy-to-use, simple-to-deploy clickwrap solution, helping organizations securely capture customer consent to standard terms. With DocuSign Click, American First Finance has visibility into a detailed audit trail, can easily version their agreements and ensure customers have consented to the latest updates, and quickly set up deployment using Click’s automatically generated code snippet.

Leveraging the DocuSign Agreement Cloud for loan applications

American First Finance is using Click, eSignature and the eSignature API as part of its customer loan application and account onboarding flow. Customers apply for their services via an electronic application on desktop, mobile and in authorized merchant’s retail locations. As part of the application, customers will need to agree to America First Finance’s standard Application Terms & Conditions, Privacy Policy, and Arbitration Agreement, using DocuSign Click. American First Finance is also testing DocuSign Identify’s SMS authentication feature to help validate the customer by sending a text. If the application is approved, American First Finance will send a contract with the terms of the agreement using DocuSign eSignature. And finally, it uses the eSignature API to return signing events back to their systems. For American First Finance, the DocuSign Agreement Cloud is helping accelerate the speed of business, minimize legal risk, and improve the customer experience.

Best practices from American First Finance

The legal team at American First Finance offers these tips in implementing a new solution for clickwrap agreements:

• Ensure you have the underlying clickwrap agreements saved in an editable format and in a location your Legal team can easily access to manager version control
• Mock-up how you want the clickwrap to be presented to your end-users so your team has a clear picture of how it should be designed.
• Think outside the box to identify clickwrap use cases (i.e. simple, consent-based agreements such as terms-of-service, end-user license agreements, marketing communications consent and more).

To hear more about American First Finance’s Agreement Cloud journey, and see a live demo of DocuSign Click, view our on-demand webinar Capture Customer Consent Online with a Single Click.

Mindy Park is a Product Marketing Manager at DocuSign.

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clickwrapFinancial ServicesLegal