Send documents for notarization
Adobe Acrobat Sign has partnered with Notarize, Inc. to provide online notarization services. In this three-part tutorial, learn how to send a document for notarization, view the signer’s experience, and receive the results.
NOTE
The Acrobat Sign integration with Notarize Inc.'s online notarization service is only available for use in the US with business- and enterprise-level service plans.
Transcript
In this walkthrough, you’ll see how the Adobe Acrobat Sign integration with Notarize offers fully digital online notarizations workflow that begins and ends in Adobe Acrobat Sign.
The demo has three parts. Sending a document for notarization, the signer’s experience with the notary, and receiving the results.
But before we get into the details, I need to do a bit of legal housekeeping first.
For those of you who are Acrobat Sign customers, this will look familiar to you. For those of you who aren’t, this is the Acrobat Sign UI where you go to initiate contracts for signature or notarization. Once we’ve logged into Acrobat Sign we can initiate the remote online notarization of a document. We’re going to use a pre-made template by selecting Start from library.
Then we’ll navigate over to the sample document for the DMV vehicle title.
Now we’ll invite signers by adding their email addresses, just like the process we use to send a document for an Acrobat Sign e-signature.
When you input the email, make sure you click on the ellipses on the far right of the email entry box to highlight that the signer will need to complete an online notarization for the document.
The process supports multiple signers and you can add another signer in the second email spot. Just don’t forget to select the Requires Notarization from the dropdown for any additional signers that need to participate in the notarization process. Once we’re ready, we can proceed to the notarized settings for this invitation by selecting Next.
We have two options to choose from. Bring Your Own Notary and Notary on Demand.
With the Bring Your Own Notary option from Notarize, you have the option to bring your own in-house notary employees into your Notarize deployment. This allows your notaries to take advantage of the more efficient and fully paperless notarial tools that the Notarize platform provides including a digital journal, video recording, and audit trail. Furthermore if both the signer and notary are employees that personally know each other, Notarize is able to bypass some identity checks, adding even more efficiency and ease of use.
When utilizing the Bring Your Own Notary option for your in-house notaries, it may be preferred to propose a specific meeting time and date for your signer and notary, and you can do that here. You can also include any specific instructions that you’d like the notary to see.
In addition to Bring Your Own Notary, Notarize offers a vast network of more than 1,000 notaries available on demand 24/7/365, also known as Notary on Demand. We’ll proceed with the Notary on Demand option for this demo. So let’s complete this notarization setup and finalize the documents.
Here as the sender, you can do any document pre-filling before you send the document to the signer. When you’ve prefilled everything needed, you can Click to Send to send to the signer.
All set, we have successfully sent a request for notarization from Acrobat Sign.
Next, let’s take a look at what your signer will see.
The signer will receive an email invitation when the document is ready for them to sign. In this example, this document has fields that the signer may pre-fill before their session with a notary.
When they click the link to review and fill out their information, they’ll land in Adobe Sign where the signer can complete their pre-filling of any relevant fields.
Note that the button says Submit. There’s nothing to sign yet because their signature will be added later during the session with a notary.
Next, the signer will get an email from Notarize letting them know their document is ready for notarization. This email also gives tips to the signer about the identity verification required for the video session before they join including the need for a government-issued ID.
When they follow the link in the email, the signer is automatically routed to the Notarize platform. From here, they’re ready to proceed with the remote online notarization session.
The signer will be prompted to fill in their name as it appears on their ID. This information will be used to generate their signature and initials.
The signer may review the document they’re about to get notarized to verify that the information they prefilled in Acrobat Sign is there and it’s accurate. So if everything looks good, we’ll click on Done Reviewing.
Once they’ve reviewed the file, they are ready to connect to their remote online notary so we’ll click Continue.
Testing equipment is essential to the timely completion of online notarization, one of the reasons that Notarize has, on average, over a 90% completion rate with their sessions.
The signer can confirm they’ve selected the correct webcam, make sure their audio is working, and ensure that they have a strong internet connection. Doing this ensures that the online notarization can be completed without disruption.
The next step is for the signer to verify their identity and enter personal information including the last four digits of their Social Security number. This is in accordance with the laws governing remote online notarization. Notarize uses a secure third-party platform to perform the dynamic knowledge-based identity check.
Dynamic knowledge-based authentication essentially consists of challenge questions based on your history that only you would know the answers to.
The signer will have two minutes to answer five of these challenge questions. If you’ve performed certain financial transactions online, this should be pretty familiar to you. The signer only needs to get four out of five questions correct to pass this portion of the online notarization and the signer gets two chances to answer these correctly. If they fail a second time, they will be locked out for 24 hours as per legislation.
They passed, next step is identity validation.
This step involves using an unexpired government-issued ID such as a current driver’s license. We have two options. The signer can take photos of their ID using their web browser or a mobile device. We recommend using a mobile device because the photo quality will be higher. If a signer chooses the mobile device option, they just enter their mobile phone number and will be directed to a webpage to complete taking a photo of their ID. There is no app install involved. For this demo, we’ll proceed with the web browser method.
Now different documents may require different forms of ID, but for the purposes of this demo we’re going to select Driver’s License.
Hold the front of the driver’s license up to the camera and align the front of it with the white corners. The signer can press any key to take a photo.
If the signer needs to retake the photo, they can click on the white button, otherwise they continue.
We’re checking two things here. First, Notarize is checking the validity of the ID and second, Notarize is also processing information on the back end to confirm that the signer is who they say they are.
The signer also has to take a photo of the back of their ID.
They’ll hold the back of the driver’s license up to the camera and align the front of it with the white corners, and press any key to take a photo.
Again, if the signer needs to retake the photo, they can click on the white button. If not, they can continue.
Now the signer is going to be prompted to enter their driver’s license number and information. Notarize uses this entry to cross-reference the information and ensure that everything is valid.
Now that the signer has verified their identity, they can proceed into the real-time video call with a notary.
When the signer gets into the video call, they see the notary’s video feed in the upper left and there’s below it. On the right side of the window, a number of tools are available for the signer to add any information or make changes if that’s allowed by the notary. When they’re ready, the signer can click Sign Now to proceed with signing this document.
They’ll create a new signature based on their name or they can use an existing signature if they’ve used the Notarize platform before.
After choosing a signature, the signer must select I Agree to indicate that the signature shown will be their electronic signature or initials.
Now we see that the signature has been placed on the document and the upper right corner of the page indicates that the signer has completed all of the actions For this document. Now it’s the notary’s turn to complete their fields.
After they witness the drag and drop of the signature, the notary will stamp the document with their electronic seal. The notary will then sign the document and note their commission expiration date and other not information. After that, the notary will then complete the session.
And that’s it, the signer may rate their experience with the notary and leave feedback if they wish.
The signer also has the option to create an account by setting a password, allowing them to come back and view any documents they’ve had notarized here. If they don’t want to do that, they can continue as a guest.
The signer will see confirmation that they finished the process. They will be emailed the completed document for their reference.
Now let’s take a look at how we will track this transaction in Acrobat Sign.
Back in Acrobat Sign, we can go to the Manage tab where we see all the documents sent to and from our account. If you click on the document just completed, the right-hand pane will show details and actions available for this file. All typical auditing and tracking features associated with Acrobat Sign will appear here also. You can click on Open Agreement in the right-hand pane to confirm that the document was successfully notarized. You can see information such as the name of the notary public, the seal, and the commission information.
And that is the complete online notarization experience using Acrobat Sign and Notarize. You can initiate, manage, track, and store these transactions within Acrobat Sign. Very easy and very efficient. Thank you for watching and if you have any questions, please visit Adobe.com or contact your Adobe representative.
TIP
When notarization is enabled for an Acrobat Sign account, the sender can select Requires notarization by selecting the ellipsis on the right side of the recipient record. The notarization option is only available for recipients with a Signer role.
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