SIGN OF THE TIMES

Dedoco’s document management technology ushers an antiquated process into the 21st century.

Imagine this: the bank has just approved your company’s loan applications and issued offer letters. Your directors need to sign them but they’re out of the country. This means the start of a laborious process involving the couriering of physical documents and multiple rounds of verifying versions and signatures, right?

Not anymore, says Daphne Ng, co-founder of Dedoco that was launched last March. The company uses technologies such as distributed ledger to provide document management and digital signing solutions. It does away with manual processes such as delivering physical documents and chasing for wet-ink signatures, increasing efficiency and savings.

With Dedoco, a company can transmit digital documents quickly and easily through a preferred cloud storage solution or via Dedoco’s peer-to-peer encrypted file sharing method. Documents can be checked in real time, anywhere. And clients are assured of privacy as neither Dedoco nor unauthorised parties can view or change a document.

Security is further reassured with the company’s Sign with SingPass digital signature service for safer, speedier online transactions. Also, unlike traditional methods of document management, Dedoco continually evolves, adding the latest advancements to its technology stack as they occur.

“We started Dedoco from listening closely to our customers’ pain points. These always involved dealing with wrong document versions and security issues, like not being able to ensure documents and signatures were tamper-proof,” says Ng, who is a former banker.

It offers tiered application programming interface (API) integrations for enterprises and tiered subscription plans designed to accommodate everyone, from budding entrepreneurs to mid-cap companies. The former makes up about 90 per cent of clientele, and its key clients hail from the government, financial services and the real estate sector. ERA Realty, for example, recently adopted its electronic document solution.

“The professional services sector, which includes accounting and corporate secretarial and legal services, is also a major vertical for us, thanks to the sheer volume of paperwork that benefits from digitisation,” adds Ng.

You could say the tech entrepreneur, whom Fintech Magazine named one of the Top 10 Women in Fintech 2019 (APAC), has business in her blood. Her family built and sold one of Singapore’s top travel agencies. Ng recalls being involved as early as in primary school. She would hand out flyers by the escalator.

Ng spent almost a decade with DBS, HSBC and Mizuho, where she specialised in trade finance. She left because of her entrepreneurial instincts and Singapore’s burgeoning fintech scene. “I had the single motivation to immerse myself in the technology space as this is where I see the future of work and the importance of a digital economy,” she says.

Ng currently sits on the boards of the Singapore Fintech Association, SGTech and the Singapore Computer Society. She also serves as a mentor with NTUC Women’s Committee.

“We are going towards a 100 per cent digital vision, and it will likely come faster than before in the next decade. Consider this: we recently conducted a market sizing and the untapped market in South-east Asia alone will be worth approximately US$300 billion (S$397 billion) in the next four years. This presents a huge opportunity for us.”

To meet this demand, Dedoco, which already has offices in Jakarta and the US, will expand its Singapore office and set up another as well as partnerships in Hong Kong this year. Ng is driven to succeed. “I want to take Dedoco global and become an index for secure document transactions globally.”