Australian law has provided a framework for the use of digital signatures since 1999, when the passage of the Electronic Transactions Act brought Australia into line with a model law developed by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law a few years earlier.But Australia has not moved very far along since then. Digital signatures are the exception rather than the rule in banking, as well as in real estate and other markets where large numbers of contract documents are signed each year. Ink on paper is still the norm.Eitan Saban's job is to change this. Saban is the recently appointed general manager for the Asia-Pacific region of the electronic signature service provider, DocuSign. He is the first person to hold that position and his appointment is part of a move to develop the San Francisco-based company's business in the region.Saban, who has been in Sydney for six weeks, said the Australian market was central to DocuSign's ambitions in the region.The company already has one big client - Commonwealth Bank. It has been working with the bank's asset management division for the past 14 months and it will be involved in a project over the next three years that will see the bank attempt to go paperless across all its businesses.Saban said DocuSign was also planning to move into the identity verification market, where it will compete with companies such as Veda.He said that use of electronic signatures in Australia was not common. "In the United States, 65 per cent of real estate contracts are completed with electronic signatures. We have invested a lot in that market to build awareness and we have to do the same here."Saban said DocuSign's "key verticals" in Australia were financial services, real estate and the IT industry. The company's pitch would be that electronic signatures not only create efficiencies but also enhance security.According to promotional material on the company's website, 800,000 documents are signed on the DocuSign network each day. One of its big claims is that document turnaround time is very fast.The other big claim is that documents signed electronically are much more secure than physical documents. Documents are protected by 256-bit encryption. Clients are offered a number of options for authenticating "signers".Saban said: "There is a lot of extra security. We know the IP address of signers and we know their geo-location."