"The saying about finding opportunities in crises rang true for us because it also meant the inevitable adoption of digital tools by companies in order to conduct business as usual with their customers," said Dedoco's CEO and co-founder Daphne Ng, who also sits on the board of SGTech. "Agreements and contracts still needed to be signed, albeit remotely and cross-border. That was when we found the perfect timing of meeting this demand."

While digitalising is vital to transforming the sector, there is also a need for digital documents to prove they can be trusted as part of risk and compliance handling.

To avert painful losses, Dedoco, which stands for Decentralized Document Connector, provides services that help firms verify the authenticity of digital documents.

"The vision is to be the trust engine for documents and records," said Ms Ng.

Outstanding in their field

Dedoco, which currently has about 45 employees in five countries including Singapore, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam, boasts several unique selling points. For instance, its Dedoco Suite offers a range of enterprise applications - dSign, dVideoSign, dCert and dForm - and various deployment options and licensing plans to suit companies of all sizes.

Traditional digital systems connected to the Dedoco Trust Engine (DTE) are also assured of trust, traceability and verifiability for every record or transaction issued through the platform or its application programming interfaces.

DTE utilises verified sharing, tokenisation and smart contracts to enable true ownership of digital documents. In contrast to the invasive implementation and lack of transformational agility that traditional systems bring, DTE ensures data is kept safe and documents made secure.

"Based on customer feedback, we have helped increase productivity and compliance tracking by up to 90 per cent while shaving costs associated with manual couriers and checking significantly," said Ms Ng.

Dedoco is also Maybank's official vendor for digital signatures for offer letters, a testament to the firm's performance.

At the start of the partnership, the team at Dedoco went through the workflows with Maybank's business and operations teams to understand the requirements and additional integrations involved to streamline processes.

"At the end of the day, the aim was to achieve straight-through processing and deliver a better customer experience for Maybank customers globally," said Ms Ng.

Maybank also gives regular feedback on what new and useful features Dedoco could add, which has been extremely helpful to the young platform.

"As the biggest bank in Malaysia, Maybank has been absolutely the greatest in terms of commitment and actualisation of their digital vision with us," she said.

 

An eye on the future

With the emergence of new digital banks and incumbent banks with new digital banking journeys, the future of banking is undoubtedly digital.

Ms Ng believes two key aspects will help shape the industry - trust and compliance, as highlighted by the sharp rise in global data breaches; and customers' digital experience, which should be as seamless and convenient as possible.

Dedoco, which has seen its users grow about five times since it started and whose clients span the government, banking, healthcare and real estate sectors, is excited to contribute to this future of banking.

"Dedoco exists to solve these two areas and more, in terms of converging both digital experience with digital security," said Ms Ng.