Electronic signature (e-signature) encompasses a broad category of methods that can be applied to an electronic document to capture intent to sign, consent, and, in varying degrees, provide document authenticity, integrity and nonrepudiation. An e-signature can have the same legal status as a handwritten, wet-ink signature on a paper document when implemented in compliance with the laws or regulations applicable to the parties involved. An e-signature product is expected to offer, support for ad hoc and human-initiated use cases, flexible workflows, Integration with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) business applications, as well as in-house or custom-built applications via APIs, and document data integration and validation.
Robotic process automation (RPA) tools perform "if, then, else" statements on structured data, typically using a combination of user interface (UI) interactions or by connecting to APIs to drive client servers, mainframes or HTML code. An RPA tool operates by mapping a process in the RPA tool language for the software "robot" to follow, with runtime allocated to execute the script by a control dashboard.