Signing authority

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Once the shooting, and the shouting, is over, there is the delicate business of putting pen to paper, so the contracts so tortuously wrangled over can be scanned, circulated, copied, digitised, OCRed, metadata extracted, catalogued, logged filed and archived do they can be locked away in deep storage and never looked at again.

Part of that process is to validate that the signatures appended to the document on your counterparty’s behalf belong to people suitably authorised by your counterparty to put them there. It seems mundane but there is deep philosophical magic in the transubstantiation of the disembodied corporate spirit into mortal hands. Consequently, there is a metaphysical oubliette down one can drop if one is so disposed, but few negotiators are that brass-necked. For how do I know who you are who you say you are?

This mostly manifests is a ditchwater-dull process of chasing down pre-prepared certificates of incumbency prepared by corporate secretarial units, bit on a slow day there is enough here to have a little fun.