How iText Software refines efficiency of businesses' digital document workflows

As the NDI ecosystem creates a need for digital document workflows, iText Software offers its solutions.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the majority of the workforce has transitioned to working remotely, and businesses have had to rapidly adapt to this change. Consequently, paperwork and other documents are now being digitally deployed at enormous rates in every sector.

As a global leader in innovative PDF software, iText Software addresses the challenges in digitally transforming document workflows, and has developed effective solutions—iText 7 Core and its comprehensive suite of add-ons, or the low code tools iText DITO® and pdf2Data.—to help businesses easily make this shift. In addition, these solutions are ideal for integration with national digital identity platforms, such as Singapore’s NDI.

The NDI ecosystem with its products provides online convenience and transactional security to clients. Consequently, many businesses digitally exchange PDF documents with their clients. And that's exactly where the renowned iText PDF SDK makes these digital document workflows easy to realise.

“The NDI API and the iText SDK are both rock solid code libraries and frameworks which are continuously being developed and innovated and are extremely well documented. In addition, the iText SDK can lean on 20 years of code development and a community of users who help each other out,” said Benedict Lee, Head of APAC Sales for iText Software

In an interview with Singapore Business Review, Lee spoke about the opportunities NDI offers, and how iText's PDF capabilities are ideal for businesses looking to integrate with the NDI platform.

NDI integration in Singaporean businesses

As one of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiatives, the NDI ecosystem aims to provide users convenience and security for their online transactions, enabling developers to experiment, build, and test solutions quickly and securely.

Companies in Singapore who have integrated with the NDI platform are said to have opened up a wide range of new business opportunities and improved their consumers' experience. Lee notes that the continuous development of an ever-expanding NDI programme is one of the principal initiatives which is driving digital economic growth for businesses in Singapore.

“NDI brings various digital initiatives like the SingPass Mobile app, MyInfo and MyInfo Business together to provide greater online convenience and transactional security for citizens and businesses,” said Lee.

However, Lee notes that organizations which still depend on procedures where manual printing, scanning, signing, and mailing of paper documents is involved are still not ready to integrate with NDI. To give these businesses an opportunity to integrate NDI, products such as iText 7 Core and its comprehensive suite of add-ons, or the low code tools iText DITO® and pdf2Data were developed to help digitalise existing digital document workflows.

“For those organisations who have already done this, with iText’s features they can surely be improved, made more secure, accessible, archivable, traceable, searchable, etc.,” he added.

Digital document workflows made easy

iText's products allow businesses to create, edit, design, redact, and secure PDF documents on a massive scale, whilst also performing tasks like data extraction, text recognition, and digitally signing PDFs. Saving time and money in different industries, it is used by well-known airlines, healthcare, financial institutions, governments, logistics, pharma, etc. in every part of the world.

For example, iText helped with the digitalisation of the Belgian civil registry recently using the low code PDF template generator iText DITO. An assessment from Hasselt University showed that this project saves about $48.61m (EUR30m) in administrative costs per year across all citizens, companies and administrations. In only 10 months, 401,500 deeds were delivered and digitally signed by the government in PDF.

iText Software Group has also achieved ISO 27001:2013 certification of its Information Security Management Systems (ISMS) covering products and treatment of confidential information.

More importantly, iText does not store or collect any customer or client data but only provides an SDK which can work in perfect harmony with NDI, any customer data remains with the client or business using the platform. iText PDF documents also comply with the ISO standards for PDF, up to and including ISO 32000-2:2017 (PDF 2.0).

Furthermore, iText continues to be actively developed and improved, with the most recent release including improved support for Thai, Khmer, and Lao languages in the pdfCalligraph add-on as well as in automatic table recognition when extracting data from PDFs with pdf2Data.

With the ongoing trend of software companies increasingly opting for a low code tool approach, Lee highlights that the company plans to expand its range of low code tools in the future while continuing the development of the iText 7 Suite.

“Developers save time by developing with iText code libraries, which makes organizations save money. Business users on the other hand are empowered by the low code tools we offer. Both are solutions which can add to the growth of your business and the digital economy in Singapore. It’s as simple as that,” said Lee.

iText 7 and iText DITO® are available for trial on iTextpdf.com 

For more information on iText and Singapore NDI, visit itextpdf.com