Shivam Singla, Founder -; CEO, Leegality

28 Mar 2022 , 01:23 PM

In an interaction with Mamta Maity, indiainfoline.com, Shivam Shingla- Founder & CEO Leegality, said “as per our estimates, the market size for digital paperwork is approximately USD 5 billion. And so, there is ample opportunity for growth.”

It’s been around six years since you launched Leegality. Please take us through your journey.

I established Leegality in 2016, when I was 22 years old, with one stated aim – to liberate Indian companies from paper. Paperwork is the critical foundation of all modern commercial transactions. Yet, unlike most other business processes, executing paperwork is largely a paper-based physical process. For businesses, this physical process is a huge logistical and operations challenge that causes delays, loss of productivity, massive inconvenience, high costs and a bad customer experience.

Leveraging the IT Act, we have built a “made for India” SaaS solution that offers businesses a unified platform to digitize each and every layer of the paperwork journey — across verticals and use cases. This means things like electronic signatures, electronic stamp duty, document automation, document assembly and more — all under one roof.  Companies get a one stop solution to digitally transform their paperwork processes across verticals and use cases.

To draw an analogy — look at what payments gateways have done for the payments system today. Collecting or making a payment is so easy and smooth — we often take it for granted.  We want to do something similar for paperwork. Through Leegality, signing, stamping and storing an agreement with your Bank is as fast (if not faster) as making a payment for your Swiggy order.

We believe our vision is shared by the customers we serve.

We are seeing great traction. More than 1000+ Indian businesses use us to digitize their critical paperwork – from BFSI Majors like HDFC Ltd., HDB Financial, ICICI Lombard, Axis Finance, IndusInd BFIL, Federal Bank, Bajaj Finance, L&T Finance (among others) to start-ups like Razorpay, WeWork, Cars24, Udaan, Delhivery, Housing, Dunzo, Khatabook (among others).

What is the market opportunity you see in India?  What are your growth and expansion plans?

We see a tremendous business opportunity in India. As per our estimates, the market size for digital paperwork is approximately USD 5 billion. And so, there is ample opportunity for growth.

Our aim is to grow the business by 10x over the next 2 years, by catering to organisations across different industries. We are strengthening our teams accordingly. In fact, by the end of this year, we are looking to double our workforce to meet the increasing demand among Indian enterprises and businesses for digitizing their documentation processes.

Unlike other tech companies — we have more than 7 former lawyers with prior experience at top Indian law firms (AZB, Trilegal, SAM, Keystone, JSA) working across our sales, marketing and product teams.  Given that our product is a “legal-tech” product that solves a uniquely legal problem — the legal experience helps in many ways.

Would like to know about your products and how it has helped businesses overcome various challenges.

Our product is a “made for India” SaaS solution that offers businesses a unified platform to sign and collect electronic signatures, pay stamp duty digitally and manage the other critical compliance and workflow aspects of document execution in a highly automated way. It is built leveraging the IT Act in India.

A digital document paradigm offers several key benefits to businesses:

– Speed: With digital flows processes that took days and weeks could be completed in minutes. Commercial relationships with customers, business partners, employees, agents and investors can begin faster.
– Security: Electronically signed documents are inherently tamper-proof. Further, electronic documents can be stored safely with multiple backups available — safe from physical hazards like fire, water and other disasters. Finally, the law itself creates evidentiary presumptions in favour of electronic documents over physical documents.
– Enhanced customer experience: A safer transaction for customers during the lockdown, and a more pleasant experience overall.
– Operational Efficiency: Merely processing the journey of physical agreements (ensuring documents is prepared with 0 mistakes, tracking delivery status, following up with customer to sign, storing and inventorying the document safely) is a big load on teams within organizations. With digital paperwork — these touchpoints either get eliminated or become completely automated.  This liberates teams from spending time on paperwork — and allows them to do more productive, meaningful work.

Please tell us about the major industries you are currently working with and which sector is more keen on working with you.

We are a horizontal solution and cater to all types of organizations. However, we have seen the most success with adoption from organizations with document heavy daily operations — like major BFSI institutions. The BFSI sectors have been our top adopters so far.

The process for getting paperwork done is a multi-layered logistics, operations and compliance exercise for companies — procuring the right stationary, printing out the paperwork, filling it in, verifying that information filled in is correct, obtaining stamp paper, affixing stamp paper, coordinating with signer for getting it signed, collecting supporting documents, transporting it to head office, inventorising it and then securely storing it.

Due to the legal and regulatory environment they operate in, BFSI organisations need to repeat this process countless times each day in order to ensure smooth operations. Depending on the size and the nature of the organization, this can easily mean hundreds, thousands and even lakhs of documents a year! Paperwork moves from being a mere annoyance — to a terrible drag on business. The physical process causes delays, massive loss of productivity and a bad customer experience for critical business functions and product lines.

There seems to be a huge market opportunity for digitisation post COVID. Please tell us how you see this landscape changing in four to five years and how optimistic you are about this change.

The perspective on what digitization means is changing. Earlier digitization was simply looked at for its own sake — as an end goal. But increasingly — businesses are adopting a deeper perspective — where they see that digitization of key processes can actually drive tangible business benefits — both for them and their customers. We are well positioned to thrive in this environment — because we offer a digital transformation of a critical process that causes significant business problems today.

Businesses who wish to move to seamless business flows will need to evaluate digital paperwork — whether now or a few years down the line.