U.K.-based Startup Cygnetise Ltd. announced today a seed funding round of $1.32 million led by London-based Calibrate Management Ltd. to push forward is authorized signatory list management services backed up by blockchain technology.

Authorized signatories are people enabled by a business to perform particular actions, particularly signing documents such as hours worked, checks, contracts and such. Up-to-date lists of people so authorized is an important part of doing business.

Cygnetise’s platform is designed to ease the labor-intensive process of maintaining and verifying lists of authorized signatories by offloading the verification portion onto a distributed ledger technology, or blockchain. Using a blockchain, lists of written and digital signatures can be attributed within a series of transactions that are secured cryptographically and are auditable across the entire organization.

In a traditional circumstance, checking an authorized signatory would involve going to the recordkeeper, asking for the list and finally manually reviewing the signatories on it. This process leads to a number of potential risks including mismatched lists between different departments, fraudulent additions to lists, lag time for the removal of authorized signatories and human error in verification.

With a blockchain, every time an addition or deletion occurs to a given authorized signatory list, every ledger is updated at the same time, with the same information. Because of the nature of blockchains, the addition or deletion is registered securely. A later audit of the signature transactions would also show when signatories were added, removed and updated with a reliable, trustworthy framework.

“We wanted to create a simple application using blockchain to bring operational efficiencies, reduce risk and mitigate the opportunities for fraud from a mandatory paper-based process,” said Stephen Pomfret, founder and chief executive officer of Cygnetise.

With the advent of blockchains, many industries have begun to experiment with the technology as a way to ease potential risks regarding paperwork and logistics. Other services include a blockchain-based document authentication solution from Factom Inc. called dLoc that can provide authentication for paper documents. Chinese electronic document company BestSign and the BitFury Group teamed up earlier this year to secure documents by recording electronic signatures on a blockchain.

In those examples, blockchain technology has been put to use in order to make it easier not just for a company to prevent fraud, but also to provide trustworthy, auditable logs of past operations. Regulatory bodies across the world require businesses to keep records of transactions, documentation and signatories in order to show that a business is operating within the law.

To keep up with legacy systems that use digital paperwork, Cygnetise uses dynamic portable document format files, or PDFs, with auto-update features to ensure a smooth transition from traditional digital paperwork to the service’s blockchain.

The signatory lists can be edited and maintained in real time. That alleviates potential delays in distributing changes to any given list and thus reduces the window in which either a new signatory must wait to start signing documents or a removed signatory is allowed to keep doing so. In this way, the platform gives companies the flexibility to grant and revoke interaction rights to partners almost instantly using a permission-based collaboration model.

Since the launch of the live platform in April 2017, Cygnetise has signed on clients from the insurance, fund management and legal industries. The latest version of the service now provides a self-service model, allowing firms to sign up directly without the need for a sales representative.

This seed round brings Cygnetise’s total funding since incorporation in May 2016 to $2.1 million (£1.6 million).

Image: Cygnetise