Legality and implementation of E-signatures in Sri Lanka

Bridge Advisory and Consulting, together with DocuSign, the world’s No.1 Electronic Signature and Agreement Cloud, recently hosted a webinar on “Electronic Signatures and Agreement Cloud – The Relevance for Sri Lanka”.

The discourse addressed key areas on the background and legality of using e-signatures in Sri Lanka, why it should be a commonality, and covered the key attributes relating to e-signature adoption. The webinar also explored how e-signatures can be used in the banking and financial sector to streamline workflow and contract management thereby increasing efficiencies significantly, the organisers said in a media release.

Held virtually in June, the webinar featured Jayantha Fernando, Director - Sri Lanka CERT & General Counsel ICTA; Revan Weerasinghe, Attorney at Law; Randil Boteju, Senior Vice President - Digital Banking and Acquisitions at Nations Trust Bank PLC and Wilson Oh, Channel Director- Asia for DocuSign.

Commenting on the legality of digital transactions in Sri Lanka, Mr. Fernando said: “Setting common legal standards for digital transactions has been a subject of discussion for many years. The earlier standard was the UNCITRAL Model Law on electronic commerce ( MLEC) 1996, which was a voluntary soft law standard. In 2005 the UN General Assembly adopted the first ever treaty on digital transactions, known as the UN E lec tron ic Communications Conve n t i o n . ” M r. Fernando referred to this as the Ecommerce law 2.0 or the International GOLD Standard governing this subject area. This establishes rules for the formation and validity of electronic contracts concluded electronically, legal recognition of electronic signatures and for the functional equivalents of paper based and original documents.

Mr. Weerasinghe said that the relevance of e-signatures today is far more than ever before, considering today’s business landscape amidst the economic crisis.

Mr. Oh noted that it is imperative that people work towards achieving a paperless economy. He said that not every company has digitised the contract process and are still manual which involves a lot of human intervention – resulting in pain points such as high operating costs, slow turnaround time, high risk due to less security and less court admissible evidence.