SignTime August 2024 newsletter: A digital company hanko? Get Ready for e-Seal: The Next Wave of Digital Transformation in Japan
Hello from the SignTime team and welcome back to our regular newsletter!
First off, thanks to everyone who came and visited us at Back Office DXPO 2024 Tokyo a few weeks ago. We had some great discussions with customers and partners and if we missed you and you’d like to request additional features/functionality or otherwise schedule a catch-up with the SignTime team, reach out and let us know!
For this newsletter we are highlighting coming changes, announcing a few operational modifications and doing a deep dive on SignTime e-Seal!
What is e-Seal?

Significant change is coming to the traditional way of doing business in Japan. Everyone in Japan, and many people overseas, are familiar with the Japanese hanko, or seal. Steeped in tradition, the use of seals in the country dates back to ancient times. Originally known as ‘inkan’ or ‘jitsuin’, these seals were mainly used for authentication of documents and as a means of identification, bearing a family crest or ‘kamon’. In modern Japan, the hanko and inkan are important business and government tools, used to formalize everything from agreements or plans in the workplace, through to formalizing real estate and other legal contracts.
Since its establishment in 2021, the Japanese Digital Agency https://www.digital.go.jp/, has been working to transform many older and (some would say) outdated practices that require physical seals and hankos. The agency has recently proposed new regulations for electronic seals, known as “e-seal.” These regulations aim to modernize and standardize the use of electronic seals in the country, providing a legal framework similar to those operating in Europe for qualified e-signatures.
As the Japanese government transforms existing practices to make them digitally relevant, the e-seal is a core part of this transformation.
As a key player in the Japan digital transformation solutions market, SignTime will be offering an e-seal solution in early 2025 to Japanese businesses. Further, SignTime is patent pending on specific physical integrations into an e-seal environment.
The new e-seal solution suite from SignTime takes a page from the physical world, and then transforms the rest of the processes securely in the cloud, allowing users to add e-seal records into the secure user account – thus allowing for the use of a binding legal e-seal as a part of that organization’s account.
Stay tuned as we get closer to the launch date and you can read more about e-seals on our blog here.
From this month, we will be making a few changes to how we communicate about application updates, fixes, etc. to our customers and readers. After examining our “Release Notes” Page, we discovered that the primary (and secondary) readers were mainly SignTime employees. Going forward, we will instead put the product improvements in the newsletter as Application Updates, and post the newsletter on our web page.
Application Updates (July-August):
- Mobile signing improvement. We know that mobile signing is becoming more and more important, so we continue to optimize for a better mobile signing experience.
- Updated signature certificate to enable more signers per certificate. We’ve removed the “shown signature” page on the certificate itself, but it is (of course) retained on the document.
- A great deal of work “under the hood” on automation which will show up later in customer facing screens, and a new overlay that allows us to announce inside the SignTime app if there are issues.
Have a development request? Let us know and we’ll see what we can do!
SignTime Data Fact!
In closing this newsletter, we’d like to offer another awesome data fact – and that number is 4 hours! That is the typical time from starting a document to completing all signatures on SignTime via email!

That’s it for this edition and if you or your team have any questions on e-seal or any other e-signature or electronic contracting issues, get in touch!
Best regards,Jim
Co-Founder and CEO