Identity fraud now costs the average business $9 million a year. Nearly seven in 10 organisations globally report rising fraud attempts over the past two years. Yet across Asia, organisations still face a fragmented landscape when it comes to verifying who is on the other side of a digital transaction.
This is not just a cybersecurity hurdle, it is a business problem. One that slows down deals, increases risks and creates friction at every step of the agreement process.
Agreements like employment contracts to cross-border trade documents are now overwhelmingly digital. They move faster, carry more complexity, and involve more parties than ever. But the systems used to verify the people signing them have not kept pace. In too many markets, identity verification still relies on disconnected private providers, outdated government portals and manual checks that slow everything down.
When identity infrastructure gets it right
Some markets have shown what is possible. In Singapore, Singpass gives residents a single digital identity that they use across everything, from checking pension balances and filing taxes, to opening bank accounts and signing legal documents. Today, Singpass covers 97% of eligible residents, processes over 41 million transactions monthly, and connects to more than 2,700 services across 800 agencies and businesses.
Critically, Singpass was not designed as an add-on. It was built as shared infrastructure, a trust layer that any service, public or private, can plug into. Hong Kong’s iAM Smart follows a similar logic, providing centralised, consent-based identity verification across government and commercial services.
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When this kind of national identity layer integrates with agreement platforms, the results are tangible. Through Docusign’s partnership with Singpass, users apply a legally enforceable electronic signature simply by authenticating through their Singpass app. The signature is linked to their verified identity and validated instantly – backed by Singapore’s National Certification Authority. No printing, no scanning, no waiting for a notary.
That is what happens when identity is embedded in the transaction, rather than treated as a separate hurdle.
The cost of fragmentation
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Compare that with markets where no unified identity layer exists. Businesses and individuals navigate a maze of disconnected systems. There are different providers for banking, another for government services, yet another for contracts, and none talk to each other. The result: repeated identity checks, inconsistent security and friction at every step.
In our research with Entrust, more than half of financial services organisations report annual fraud losses exceeding $1 million. The most common attack vector remains the most basic: usernames and passwords, accounting for 51% of fraud cases. Systems using facial biometric liveness detection see that figure drop to 21%.
The impact goes beyond fraud. Across the agreement lifecycle, 52% of organisations wait for identity and notary verification before closing a deal. That delay translates directly into lost revenue, slower onboarding, and a worse experience for customers and partners.
This is especially acute in Southeast Asia, where cross-border trade is growing rapidly but each market has its own identity systems. A Singapore-based company closing an agreement with a counterpart in Indonesia or Vietnam faces a completely different verification landscape in each market. There is no shared trust layer to speed things along.
Meeting businesses where they are
Agreement platforms can help. Docusign, for instance, has invested heavily in identity verification tools from ID document checks and biometric matching to knowledge-based authentication, precisely because many markets lack infrastructure such as Singpass. These tools embed verification directly into the signing workflow, removing the need for a separate identity step.
Private sector solutions and platforms like Docusign have stepped up considerably, offering business secure and scalable identity verification that works across markets, with or without a national framework in place. Where government–backed identity exists, these tools can integrate seamlessly; where it does not, they offer a standalone solution.
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What comes next
As AI-powered services such as automated contract analysis and AI agents spread across Asia, the need for robust identity infrastructure will only grow. Docusign’s upcoming MCP server, for instance, will allow AI agents to interact with contracts and workflows through natural language, but that capability is only as trustworthy as the identity verification underpinning it. That requires identity systems that are secure, interoperable, and built for scale.
The lessons from Singapore and Hong Kong illustrate what best-in-class integration looks like and the bar it sets for seamless, trusted digital transactions. For business across the rest of Asia, the tools to meet that bar already exist. Digital identity is not a feature you add to a transaction but it is what makes it trustworthy, something that businesses can act on now.
Kartik Krisnamurthy is the vice president of Docusign Asia.
