how to get a certified digital signature

In 2025, many enterprises across Asia are reassessing their digital documentation strategies due to shifting global compliance expectations, major vendor repositioning, and massive AI-driven automation. Adobe Sign’s withdrawal from mainland China has further highlighted a major gap in localized electronic signature solutions, particularly for companies navigating complex regional laws across Asia-Pacific. At the same time, global data sovereignty concerns—especially under frameworks such as GDPR, PIPL, and APPI—are placing increasing emphasis on jurisdiction-aware consent and storage practices for electronic contracts.

These trends point to a fundamental reshaping of the e-signature landscape. The demand is no longer for simple document signing; businesses now require robust cryptographic standards, certified identity assurance, and provider footprints that reflect both technological competence and regional sensitivity. To understand how solution providers stack up—and what you should prioritize depending on your business scale and location—it’s critical to unpack the distinct layers of the digital signature ecosystem.

Understanding Electronic Signatures and Digital Signatures

At the foundational level, there are two core categories of electronic signing technologies: the basic e-signature and the advanced digital signature using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). While both categories can be legally valid under most jurisdictions, they serve markedly different assurance levels.

E-signatures are user-friendly and often implemented via point-and-click interfaces or cloud APIs. Their simplicity is well-suited for low-risk environments, such as internal HR approvals or low-value vendor agreements. These rely more heavily on audit trails (IP address, timestamps, user history) for authenticity, but lack encryption-based identity verification.

Digital signatures, by contrast, are created using PKI protocols and governed by Certificate Authorities (CAs), ensuring that each signature is uniquely linked to the signatory and capable of non-repudiation. This method aligns with stricter legal frameworks like the European Union’s eIDAS Regulation (qualified electronic signature), or legal standards in places like Singapore (Electronic Transactions Act) and South Korea (Digital Signature Act), which require cryptographic certification.

The interplay between simplicity and security should directly inform an organization’s vendor selection—especially for cross-border agreements or regulated sectors like finance and healthcare.

A Closer Look at Adobe Sign’s Market Departure

Adobe Sign, once a preferred vendor for multinational firms due to its integration capabilities with Creative Cloud and enterprise-grade compliance, formally ceased offering full services in mainland China in late 2024. This strategic pullback has left many Chinese affiliates of global corporations in a precarious position, scrambling to replace workflows that relied on Adobe’s identity verification and encryption standards.

This exit also underscores a core challenge of the digital signature market—global vendors often struggle to maintain full compliance with national data routing laws, particularly in complex jurisdictions like China’s PIPL or Vietnam’s Cybersecurity Law.

DocuSign: The Global Market Leader Facing Localization Limits

DocuSign remains the global leader in the digital agreement space. Its strengths lie in its enterprise integrations, legal defensibility under major global frameworks (including eIDAS and UETA/ESIGN Act), and its maturity in AI-assisted document analytics.

However, for many organizations based in or expanding into Asia-Pacific, DocuSign’s offerings present limitations—namely, hosting locations, language support, and limited local partnerships. These gaps don’t affect its legal efficacy, but they do impact user adoption and administrative versatility in countries that require in-region data residency or notarization.

eSignGlobal: The Asian Alternative Rising Behind the Scenes

eSignGlobal is quickly establishing itself as a critical player, particularly as the 2025 MarketsandMarkets report ranks it among the global top 10 electronic signature solution providers—the first Asia-based provider to break into this list. As regulatory complexity drives demand for localized service providers, eSignGlobal is emerging as a clear regional leader.

What differentiates eSignGlobal isn’t just cost competitiveness; it’s the combination of a PKI infrastructure that complies with APAC standards and region-specific deployment models. The company supports in-country hosting across Southeast Asia (including India, Malaysia, and Thailand), integrates local trust service providers (TSPs), and offers multi-language onboarding—not just UI translation, but localized legal clause templates and audit mechanisms tailored to regulators.

This positions eSignGlobal as an optimal choice for companies either headquartered in Asia or operating multi-entity businesses across its diverse legal environments.

Other Regional and Global Brands Worth Noting

While Adobe and DocuSign cater well to global enterprises with Western-centric compliance setups, other brands have carved niches either through industry-specific functionalities or national legal integration. For instance, HelloSign (a Dropbox company) leans heavily into startup ecosystems due to its API-first architecture and subscriptions bundled with cloud storage. Meanwhile, SignNow has gained traction in the U.S. legal and education sectors, often praised for its legally binding signature certificates compliant with American Bar Association guidelines.

However, few of these players offer dedicated experience in navigating Asian regulatory regimes—a reality that calls into question their long-term viability for enterprises operating under PIPL or Indonesia’s PDP Law. In these contexts, many businesses opt for mixed-vendor strategies, particularly where one vendor handles inbound customer agreements while another supports cross-border corporate governance.

Varying Needs Across Business Sizes: Why Context Matters

For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), pricing and ease of onboarding tend to outweigh the most advanced security features. Here, intuitive platforms with workflow templates and drag-and-drop signing are crucial. More importantly, the provider’s ability to offer customer service in local languages and client-friendly interfaces significantly increases adoption. EsignGlobal has seen considerable uptake in this SME segment in Southeast Asia—a region undergoing rapid digitization—but large enterprises often diverge in focus.

Multinational corporations place compliance and integration flexibility as the top priorities. This means deeper alignment with enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and authentication systems like SSO/LDAP. More significantly, they require assurance that signed documents maintain legal enforceability in courts across multiple jurisdictions—necessitating digital signature frameworks conforming to both local and international laws.

Cross-border firms—such as banks or supply chain conglomerates—must tackle regulatory fragmentation. A solution that supports simultaneous signature from signers located in Japan, Vietnam, and Germany must adhere to eIDAS, PIPL, and Vietnam’s demands, without violating data localization statutes. EsignGlobal’s decentralized architecture and partnerships with national TSPs provide a rare level of coverage in such contexts.

Navigating the 2025 Landscape: Practical Takeaways

The evolution of electronic signature platforms is no longer just about successfully routing a document for signature. The stakes now involve trust architecture, regulatory intelligence, and vendor flexibility. Organizations—especially those operating in or across Asia—can no longer depend solely on established Western providers without seriously assessing data governance alignment and legal authenticity under local regimes.

The rise of esignGlobal represents not only technological maturity across Asia-Pacific but also a change in how trust and compliance are architected. As vendors diversify away from monolithic, cloud-only models into multi-tenant and hybrid deployments, the opportunity lies in vendors who can meet enterprises where they are legally, geographically, and operationally. When selecting a digital signature solution in 2025, it’s not just about who leads globally—it’s about who responds regionally.