Qualified Electronic Signature | Meaning & Best Tools

Nikita R.

Media-savvy content creator, with a curiosity for all Salesforce experiences.

Updated: Jan 13th, 2025

Why not switch to using Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) to electronically sign digital documents these days. They are considered to be equivalent to wet signatures in the European Union and many other places that abide by the Electronic Identification and Trust Services Regulation (eIDAS).

If you want to find out more about QES and how they can be beneficial to your business, follow our article below.

Since QES is a type of advanced electronic signature, let’s start with this topic.

What is an electronic signature?

Also known online as eSigntures, they are a representation of a person’s physical signature in a digital format used to sign or simply mark digital agreements.

eSignatures are useful for individuals and companies as they allow signers to quickly agree to the content displayed before them in a form, document, or even pop-up notification box.

In some instances, eSignatures can also be used to identify an individual for business transactions online.

Ultimately, eSignatures are widely used for electronically signing contracts, agreements, and forms instantly.

eSignatures can take on many forms online and serve different purposes. Let’s take a look at the most popular eSigantures.

An Image of a Physical Signature

The first type of eSignature that is popular to use is a scanned signature. Many people find that creating a physical signature and then scanning it into digital format on their local computer is a good option to speed up document signing processes. These scanned signatures are usually saved as PNG or JPG files and can be inserted into digital documents whenever a signature is required. This eSignature is easy to use, but it is not the safest way to sign digital documents, unfortunately.

Digital Signatures

These types of signatures are often confused with advanced electronic signatures, but it’s important to know that they stand out because they are super secure. Digital signatures are unique since they consist of cryptographic techniques, and when added to a document, they help to maintain the validity of the contract.

Biometric Signatures

Now, these are interesting and advanced eSignatures. Biometric signatures go beyond simple marks on documents by using a person’s fingerprint, facial features, or eye scan to verify their identity. These types of eSignatures provide documents with a very high level of security and make these types of documents extremely hard to forge.

Qualified Electronic Signatures

But back to the topic at hand, which is QES. They also fall under the electronic signatures category and are considered to be legally binding in many locations. QES are exceptionally popular in the European Union or other countries that have followed a similar legal system. Within these countries, QES have a very high level of authority under the eSignature requirements category as they provide top security measures for digital documents.

Take a look at some of the key features you get from Qualified Electronic Signatures for contracts:

QES are legal and trustworthy tools as they follow the legal laws stipulated by the eIDAS Regulation in the European Union.

QES can verify the identity of an individual signing a document.

QES are protected against forgery as they use a secure signature creation device (SSCD), which creates a private key during signature creation.

A QES and Digital Signature Provider

If you need to add QES and digital signatures to your document-signing processes in Salesforce, we can help you save some research time. There are many applications that can add signing solutions to your Salesforce platform, but they are not created equally.

You want a trusted and reliable Salesforce solution to manage your sensitive contract data, so take a look at the following third-party e-signature apps that can instantly add value to your business operations.

DocuSign

DocuSign is a super popular QES and digital signature solution for Salesforce currently. This sturdy platform can give your employees a strong Salesforce integration. By combining DocuSign and Salesforce, your workforce can send and electronically sign documents from Salesforce. They will also be able to track the status of the documents that they sent out for signing.

Main Features worth Remembering:

Employees can create documents in Salesforce.

Signers can verify their identity with selfies.

Managers can track documents in Salesforce

Adobe Sign

Next up, we have Adobe Sign, previously known as Adobe EchoSign. Adobe Sign is as popular as DocuSign for electronically signing documents in Salesforce. Customers use Adobe Sign as they get to electronically sign a whole range of documents and forms, especially if they are subscribed to other Adobe products that they enjoy working with.

Main Features worth Remembering:

They provide a central location to work and electronically sign PDFs.

You can collect signatures fast with Adobe Sign.

They are compatible on desktop and mobile devices.

Dropbox Sign

Previously known as HelloSign, this electronic signature solution makes it onto our list since it’s really easy to use and integrates well with many other business tools. With the HelloSign API, it’s easy to add QES and digital signatures into document-signing processes that need to sync up to Salesforce.

Main Features worth Remembering:

Employees can prepare and send digital documents for electronic signing.

You can track eSignatures.

They provide audit trails, so you have evidence of your document being reviewed and signed.

Titan Sign

Last but not least, we have Titan Sign. It’s a no-code application that is your best option to help you sign documents with QES (via GlobalSign) and digital signatures swiftly. Titan Sign can also help you create documents and deliver them in minutes with document automation, and then you get the added benefit of tracking the whole contract lifecycle within Salesforce.

Main Features worth Remembering:

Businesses can create responsive Salesforce signing processes with a simple drag-and-drop builder.

Titan eSignatures are fully accessible and meet all requirements outlined in section 508.

Titan eSignatures are completely secure and compliant with HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO, GDPR, and other leading frameworks.

We hope to see you soon! 

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Disclaimer: The comparisons listed in this article are based on information provided by the companies online and online reviews from users. If you found a mistake, please contact us.