For years, platforms like DigiLocker allowed people to store and share personal documents like driver’s licenses or grade 12 mark sheets in digital formats. But for enterprises, the management of compliance documents has so far been a deeply manual process – stacks of papers, notarized documents, and disparate drives.
Enter Entity Locker, part of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, which enables corporates, startups, MSMEs, and NGOs to store corporate identity/legal documents in the digital space.
What is Entity Locker?
Entity Locker is a product built by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and National eGovernance Division (NeGD) to provide a secure digital vault for enterprises that is mapped to their official registered entity (private limited, LLP, trust, proprietorship, etc.) using their CIN, GSTN, or PAN.
If DigiLocker is your personal digital wallet where you store your ID proofs and mark sheets, Entity Locker is the corporate equivalent of DigiLocker for your company legal documents.
Key Features
- Aadhaar authentication of the nodal officer: Entity Locker allows organizations to nominate a Nodal Officer through an authorization letter who is the single point of contact for managing the locker.
- Direct sanctioning from regulatory authorities: The locker allows the organization to directly apply to relevant regulators (MCA, GSTN, DGFT and many more…) and have certificates uploaded into the locker.
- Consent-based third-party sharing: To apply for a business loan, or to participate in a government tender, instead of physically submitting PDFs, lenders and government agencies can request consent to view the documents in real-time
- Legally Valid e-Signature: Documents saved in Entity Locker can be digitally signed to provide legal authenticity in electronic format
Why should businesses care?
Document submission and verification processes are a frequent cause of delays in vendor onboarding, GST registration, FSSAI licenses, etc. With Entity Locker, organizations can digitally store and share documents with a high degree of authenticity, ease and speed.
Similarly, for MSMEs, loan applications get stuck in the system due to cumbersome KYC and compliance procedures. By leveraging the digital vault, financial institutions can instantly access the relevant documents with the consent of the organization, thereby expediting loan disbursement. The same applies to government tenders.
Moreover, fraudulent misrepresentation by vendors or contractors can be checked, as every document that is uploaded into the locker is digitally authenticated by the issuing authority.
Looking at the Larger Canvas
The Entity Locker ecosystem will reduce the overhead of manual document management, and enable enterprises to focus on their growth. Entity Locker is part of a larger vision to transition from paper-based management systems to a secure digital public infrastructure.
By digitizing the corporate identity lifecycle, enterprises will save extensive amounts of time and human resources, and reduce fraud in the process.
