Enel Group: A New Standard for Digital Signatures on a Global Scale
How the world’s energy leader unified and governed the signature lifecycle across 32 countries, integrating 16 subsystems in just 9 months.
Enel Group is the world’s largest private player in the energy sector, with a presence in over 30 countries, 74 million customers, and a distribution network spanning 2.2 million kilometers. With such a vast and distributed structure, managing documentary processes and signatures represented a critical challenge for operational efficiency.
32
Countries involved in the project
16
Integrated subsystems
9
Months for end-to-end delivery
The project involved the creation of a unified platform for global digital signature management, capable of orchestrating complex workflows, ensuring multi-jurisdictional compliance, and integrating with existing legacy systems in every country.
The Challenge: Governing Global Complexity
Before implementing the new solution, Enel had to manage a fragmented landscape of digital signature systems and processes. Each country had developed its own local solutions, which were often incompatible, utilizing different providers and heterogeneous standards.
The Critical Issues to Address
- Technological Fragmentation: 16 different systems with proprietary logic and interfaces
- Multi-jurisdictional Compliance: Diverse regulations across 32 countries, from Europe to Latin America
- Lack of Visibility: Impossible to track document status in a centralized manner
- Local Provider Dependency: High costs and difficulty in negotiating uniform terms
The Solution: A Provider-Agnostic Platform
In partnership with Intesa (a Kyndryl Company), a European Qualified Trust Service Provider, a centralized digital signature orchestration platform was created. This platform acts as an abstraction layer between corporate processes and various signature providers.
Full coordination of the signature lifecycle—from request to archiving—with configurable workflows for every document type.
Native connectors for the 16 existing systems, eliminating the need to replace local applications already in use.
The ability to use different Trust Service Providers based on the country and the required signature type (AES, QES, SES).
Automated management of regulatory requirements for each jurisdiction: eIDAS in Europe and local regulations in Latin America.
Adopted Signature Standards
The platform supports three levels of electronic signature, automatically selected based on the country and the specific document type:
Advanced Electronic Signature (AES): Used in European countries for contracts and documents requiring a high level of security and signer identification.
Qualified Electronic Signature (QES): For documents with legal value equivalent to a handwritten signature, used for deeds requiring the highest level of legal certainty.
Standard Electronic Signature (SES): For non-European countries where local regulations do not require advanced standards, while still ensuring traceability and integrity
Audit Trail and Centralized Governance
A key element of the project was the implementation of a comprehensive audit trail system that allows every signature operation to be tracked in real-time:
- Tracking of who signed, when, and from which device
- Centralized Dashboard for global monitoring of all workflows
- Automatic Alerts for expiring documents or missing signatures
- Reporting for compliance and internal audits
- Legal Archiving (compliant storage) of signed documents
“Digital signature has transformed internal processes, both with energy suppliers and customers. Having a single platform allows us to operate with the same efficiency in every country.”
Digital Transformation Team – Enel Group
The Results: Speed, Control, and Savings
The implementation of the platform has delivered measurable benefits across all operational dimensions:
Reduced Time-to-Signature: processes that previously took days or weeks to collect signatures across multiple countries are now completed in hours, thanks to push notifications and mobile signing capabilities.
Centralized Governance: for the first time, management has complete visibility into all signature workflows globally, with KPIs and SLAs monitored in real-time.
Cost Reduction: centralized negotiations with providers and the elimination of redundant solutions have generated significant operational savings.
Guaranteed Compliance: every signature automatically meets the regulatory requirements of the specific country, mitigating legal risk and simplifying audits.
A Strategic Technological Partnership
The success of this project was made possible through the collaboration with Intesa, leveraging their expertise as a Qualified Trust Service Provider with over 1 billion remote signatures managed annually.
The decision to adopt a provider-agnostic approach has allowed Enel to maintain the flexibility needed to adapt to regulatory and technological evolutions without being tied to a single vendor (avoiding vendor lock-in). The platform can seamlessly integrate new Trust Service Providers or replace existing ones without impacting core business processes.
This project serves as a prime example of how digitalizing documentary processes can become a competitive advantage for large global organizations, transforming complexity into efficiency and fragmentation into governance.
