Europe Digital Signature Market Outlook, 2030

With mobile penetration in Europe reaching approximately 90%, the growing reliance on smartphones and tablets for everyday tasks is driving demand for digital signature solutions that are mobile-friendly. Mobile compatibility enables users to sign documents anytime and from anywhere, offering critical flexibility for remote workers and professionals on the move. This convenience not only boosts productivity but also enhances the customer experience by providing a fast, simple, and hassle-free signing process. As a result, businesses can strengthen their brand image and foster customer loyalty.

Moreover, mobile-based digital signatures are highly cost-efficient, eliminating expenses tied to traditional paper-based workflows like printing, mailing, and physical storage. In Europe, approximately 72% of organizations still rely on a combination of paper-based and electronic documents, with certain departments within these organizations operating entirely digitally. The shift to electronic signatures has proven beneficial, notably in cutting or completely eliminating agreement-related costs. On average, e-signatures help save between USD 4 and USD 10 per document and reduce paper usage by about 1,280 pages per agreement.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for contactless document handling, pushing businesses to adopt safer, more secure, and efficient ways to sign and manage agreements. This shift fueled the adoption of digital tools, leading to a surge in online applications and business activities. As companies leaned more heavily on digital assets to enhance operational efficiency and streamline management systems, sectors like legal, banking, finance, and healthcare increasingly turned to e-signature solutions to safeguard document privacy and ensure secure transactions.

According to the research report “Europe Digital Signature Market Outlook, 2030” the Europe Digital Signature market is projected to reach market size of 13.07 Billion by 2030. As the post-pandemic landscape takes shape, digital transformation has become a top priority for enterprises across Europe. E-signature adoption is emerging as a crucial component of these transformation strategies, enabling organizations to streamline workflows, maintain regulatory compliance, and boost overall efficiency. Typically led by IT and legal teams who manage and oversee digital agreements many companies are kickstarting their digital agreement journeys with the implementation of e-signature tools.

This not only eliminates bottlenecks in traditional processes but also revolutionizes how businesses operate across industries. The rapid expansion of the e-commerce sector is further fueling demand, as digital signatures enhance supply chain integration, strengthen customer and partner relationships, and improve operational agility. As more businesses go digital, the need for secure, legally binding documentation grows driving demand for robust e-signature solutions capable of protecting sensitive online transactions. In 2020, Europe witnessed a sharp rise in cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, with the number of significant attacks doubling from 146 in 2019 to 304, according to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA).

The healthcare sector was particularly impacted, facing a 47% increase in attacks as cybercriminals exploited the pandemic’s pressure on vital services. The accelerated adoption of e-signatures to support remote work during the COVID-19 crisis also opened new vulnerabilities, including a spike in phishing scams. These scams often mimic trusted services like DocuSign, tricking users into revealing sensitive information. Software companies remain frequent targets of such malicious campaigns. Despite these threats, mobile-based signing continues to gain traction due to its convenience.

Market Drivers

• eIDAS Regulation Driving Legal Uniformity: The eIDAS Regulation provides a unified legal framework across EU member states, offering mutual recognition of digital signatures. This seamless cross-border validity is unique to Europe and strongly promotes adoption, especially in multi-country businesses and EU-wide government transactions.
• Push for Green and Sustainable Operations: Europe’s strong focus on sustainability and environmental impact has led companies to adopt paperless workflows, with digital signatures playing a key role. Many European enterprises prioritize eco-conscious operations, and cutting down on printing and shipping paper documents aligns with corporate ESG goals.

Market Challenges

• Fragmented Digital Maturity Among EU States: While North America has relatively uniform tech infrastructure, Europe shows large disparities. Countries like Germany and France have high digital adoption, while others lag due to limited resources or slower policy implementation, making it difficult for vendors to scale uniformly.
• Complex Multilingual and Multi-Jurisdictional Requirements: European companies must navigate multiple languages, cultures, and legal systems. This creates integration challenges for digital signature providers, who must customize workflows and interfaces for each region, unlike North America’s largely English-speaking, unified legal environment.

Market Trends

• Digitization of Public Sector and Citizen Services: European governments are aggressively digitizing services like healthcare, tax, and immigration through national ID systems (e.g., France’s FranceConnect, Estonia’s digital ID). This trend fuels demand for verified e-signatures integrated into secure e-government platforms.
• Cross-Industry Adoption Led by SMEs and Legal Sector: Unlike North America, where BFSI dominates, in Europe SMEs and the legal sector are strong adopters due to flexible eIDAS tiers (Simple, Advanced, Qualified). Smaller European businesses embrace digital signatures for cost savings and compliance, while legal firms use them to modernize document-heavy workflows.

The growing complexity of digital signature implementation and the need for customization, integration, and compliance support are driving the rapid growth of services in the digital signature market.

As organizations across industries increasingly adopt digital signatures, many are realizing that simply deploying off-the-shelf software is not enough to meet their unique operational, legal, and security requirements. This has led to a rising demand for specialized services such as consulting, system integration, managed services, and technical support.

Enterprises often require assistance in integrating digital signature solutions with existing platforms like ERP, CRM, and document management systems, ensuring seamless workflow automation. Additionally, services play a crucial role in helping businesses navigate region-specific compliance frameworks such as eIDAS in Europe, ESIGN and UETA in the U.S., and IT Act guidelines in India.

Many organizations also depend on service providers to train internal teams, design custom workflows, and ensure the secure implementation of digital identities and certificates. As regulations become more stringent and digital ecosystems more complex, service providers are becoming indispensable partners in enabling smooth and scalable deployment of digital signature solutions, thereby fueling the growth of the services segment in the market.

The healthcare and life sciences sectors are rapidly adopting digital signatures to enhance data security, ensure regulatory compliance, and streamline documentation processes in increasingly digital and remote healthcare environments.

The growing adoption of digital signatures in the healthcare and life sciences industry is primarily driven by the urgent need to secure sensitive patient data, reduce paperwork, and comply with stringent regulatory standards such as HIPAA, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, and GDPR. As healthcare providers shift toward electronic health records (EHRs), telemedicine, e-prescriptions, and digital patient onboarding, the volume of critical documentation requiring secure authentication has increased significantly. Digital signatures offer a legally binding and tamper-proof way to validate consent forms, clinical trial documents, prescriptions, and medical records, while also ensuring that audit trails are maintained for regulatory scrutiny.

In life sciences, where complex workflows span research, manufacturing, and compliance, digital signatures help accelerate approval cycles, improve collaboration among global teams, and reduce time-to-market for new drugs or devices. Additionally, the pandemic highlighted the importance of remote solutions, further pushing hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and laboratories to invest in secure, scalable, and compliant digital signature tools that support both patient trust and operational efficiency.

Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) are gaining traction due to their highest level of legal recognition and compliance with stringent international regulations, making them ideal for high-trust, high-risk transactions.

Qualified Electronic Signatures (QES) are experiencing significant growth in the digital signature market because they offer the strongest legal standing among all electronic signature types, being equivalent to handwritten signatures under laws like the European Union’s eIDAS regulation. QES requires a verified digital certificate issued by a qualified trust service provider (QTSP), which ensures the identity of the signer has been thoroughly authenticated. This level of security and legal validity is crucial for sectors like finance, healthcare, legal, and government, where transactions involve sensitive data or binding contracts.

As global organizations prioritize data protection, regulatory compliance, and cross-border transactions, the demand for secure and trustworthy signing solutions has surged. QES provides non-repudiation, strong encryption, and clear audit trails, which not only ensure security but also build confidence among users and regulators. Moreover, as digital transformation accelerates, businesses are shifting towards robust solutions that can withstand legal scrutiny, especially in international and high-value agreements making QES an increasingly preferred choice in the evolving digital signature landscape.

Russia’s digital signature market is growing primarily due to government-led digitalization initiatives, stringent regulatory requirements, and increasing adoption across public and private sectors.

Russia is witnessing rapid growth in its digital signature market driven by strong governmental push for digital transformation across key sectors, especially in governance, finance, healthcare, and legal domains. The Russian government has mandated the use of electronic signatures in a wide range of official procedures and introduced regulations such as Federal Law No.

63-FZ on Electronic Signatures, which provides a clear legal framework for digital transactions. These laws not only enhance trust in digital tools but also enforce compliance among businesses. Additionally, Russia’s focus on achieving greater data sovereignty and reducing dependency on foreign IT infrastructure has led to a surge in locally developed e-signature solutions.

As businesses increasingly shift toward paperless workflows and e-governance platforms gain traction, electronic signatures have become essential for authenticating documents, ensuring legal validity, and maintaining secure communication. The COVID-19 pandemic further accelerated the adoption of contactless and secure signing methods, prompting enterprises and public institutions alike to integrate digital signature technologies for efficiency and continuity.

• February 2024: Alohi announced that it had updated its Sign.Plus platform to provide seamless document-related services. The latest enhancements include a new product identity, launch of scan.plus integration, identity verification, enhanced date annotation field, Single Sign-On (SSO), office integration, bulk send, enhanced file upload options, zapier integration, and resend reminders, among others.
• January 2024: Box, Inc. revealed that its e-signature tool, Box Sign, received support for compliance with the FDA 21 CFR Part 11 regulations for e-signatures.
• July 2023: Tinexta’s subsidiary InfoCert S.p.A. acquired over 65% of the share capital of Ascertia Limited. With this, the company expects to strengthen its geographic presence, expand into untapped markets, and integrate the acquired company’s Public Key Infrastructure and Electronic Signature solutions with InfoCert’s existing Digital Trust products.
• June 2023: Alohi introduced a new enterprise plan for its corporate clients under its premium eSigning solution, Sign.Plus. The latest model has 14-day free trials for all plans, enabling customers to experience the solution’s abilities at scale.

Considered in this report

• Historic Year: 2019
• Base year: 2024
• Estimated year: 2025
• Forecast year: 2030

Aspects covered in this report

• Digital Signature Market with its value and forecast along with its segments
• Various drivers and challenges
• On-going trends and developments
• Top profiled companies
• Strategic recommendation

By Component

• Software
• Hardware
• Services

By End User

• BFSI
• Health Care & Life Science
• IT & Telecom
• Government
• Retail
• Others

By Signature

• Advanced Electronics Signatures(AES)
• Qualified Electronics Signatures(QES)

By Deployment Mode

• Cloud-Based
• On-Premises

The approach of the report:

This report consists of a combined approach of primary as well as secondary research. Initially, secondary research was used to get an understanding of the market and listing out the companies that are present in the market. The secondary research consists of third-party sources such as press releases, annual report of companies, analyzing the government generated reports and databases.

After gathering the data from secondary sources primary research was conducted by making telephonic interviews with the leading players about how the market is functioning and then conducted trade calls with dealers and distributors of the market. Post this we have started doing primary calls to consumers by equally segmenting consumers in regional aspects, tier aspects, age group, and gender. Once we have primary data with us we have started verifying the details obtained from secondary sources.

Intended audience

This report can be useful to industry consultants, manufacturers, suppliers, associations & organizations related to this industry, government bodies and other stakeholders to align their market-centric strategies. In addition to marketing & presentations, it will also increase competitive knowledge about the industry.