Signature Documentation
05Legal & Governance
This section touches real legal exposure directly, so it stays strictly to what Signature's actual governing documents and systems say, and names plainly what would benefit from separate legal review rather than asserting it.
Cooperative Structure
Admission is by referral or Board sponsorship only, and the Board holds full discretion over acceptance. The agreement a member accepts is not a static document quietly baked into the product. It is generated and verified at the moment of acceptance, so what a member sees and what is recorded as accepted are provably the same text. A mandatory, asset-specific lock-up period applies to every contribution: early redemption or liquidation requests are not permitted, the legal counterpart to the marketplace's own configurable holding period.
A separate Walk-In Agreement governs applicants who join without a personal referrer. It grants only provisional candidate status, explicitly not automatic admission, and bars any financial transaction during that candidacy period until the Society's leadership formally sponsors the applicant.
Member Rights & Obligations
Beyond the transfer and lock-up terms above, the Membership Agreement includes broad indemnification of the Society, its trustees, and its developers, with a member's own liability capped at twelve months of their own admin fees paid. Disputes route through internal review first, then binding arbitration.
The strongest evidence of real member power sits in the governance system itself, not in legal language alone. A proposal to sell an asset must actually pass a quorum-and-majority vote, weighted by units held and locked in at the moment each vote is cast so a later trade cannot retroactively shift the outcome, before staff can even record the resulting proceeds. That is a structural gate on asset disposal, not an advisory poll members can be overruled on.
Regulatory Positioning
Signature's position is stated identically in its legal documents and on its public site:
"This platform is a proprietary administrative interface operating exclusively for registered members of Signature Private Multipurpose Cooperative Society Limited, registered under the Nigerian Co-operative Societies Act 98 of 2004 (Registration No. ABSG/MOPASP/2026/00343). We do not solicit funds from the general public, issue securities, or offer investment advisory services."
Nigeria's Data Protection Act is cited substantively in Signature's privacy policy, both as a retention-disclosure obligation and as the concrete set of rights it grants members: access, correction, deletion, objection, and portability of their own data. Those rights are not just stated; the self-service data export and deletion tools described under Proof of Concept operationalize them directly.
No specific citation to Nigeria's Companies and Allied Matters Act appears anywhere in Signature's current legal documentation. If a claim specifically about that Act is ever needed, it requires separate legal sourcing; nothing in this review backs it, and nothing here should be read as implying it.
Asset Custody & Title
The trust structure is embedded in a real document every member can obtain, not just marketing language. Every Certificate of Unit Ownership a member can download carries a formal trust statement:
"The underlying asset is held in trust by Signature Private Multipurpose Cooperative Society Limited as trustee for the members who capitalized it, in proportion to their Cooperative Asset Units."
alongside an explicit disclaimer that the certificate is not itself a title deed. A member only ever receives an actual title-deed-class document if they consolidate one hundred percent of a single asset's units. For the platform's actual fractional product, this certificate and its trust statement is the only title-adjacent document any member ever receives, which matches what is stated publicly.
Internally, the system does not maintain a distinct legal-entity record representing the Society itself as titleholder in the way it maintains, say, a member record. In practice this is normal. Real trust structures are usually a paper and registry fact, not something every system needs a dedicated internal record for. But it is worth being precise: the trustee claim rests on consistent process and formally generated documents, not on a first-class internal record proving it on its own, and this documentation does not overstate that distinction either way.
The Society's registered address as stated in its own binding Membership Agreement differs by a single digit from the address shown publicly on the website and in the Society's contact information (see Contact). One of the two is incorrect. This is exactly the kind of small, checkable inconsistency worth resolving before this documentation, or the underlying legal document, goes in front of anyone external.
The Membership Agreement describes unit transfers as approved individually by the Board, member to member only, with written notice and an administrative fee. The platform itself implements this as an automated, scheduled resale market open only to existing members instead. The underlying policy is the same in both cases (transfers stay inside the membership), but the exact mechanism described in the legal text and the mechanism actually running are not identical, and both should be described accurately going forward rather than treated as interchangeable.