Our Business Case for Banks
Core problems of document processes
Manual document processes are costly, inefficient, fragmented, error-prone and a potential compliance risk.
Core and non-core banking applications are legal document silos leading to repetitive processes and inconsistency. These applications contain their own isolated/application-specific legal documents, their own manual update cycles and their own automated document creation process (if any), creating many forms of duplication. In addition, interdependency between Legal and IT staff to update legal content in these applications creates another layer of inefficiency and delay.
Banks do not have insights in clauses, obligations, risks, and critical data in contracts on both individual and portfolio basis which leads to reduced critical decision making and poor management of legal, financial and operational risk. This means reduced productivity, higher costs and slow and inaccurate reporting.
USE CASES
Client Challenge
The corporate credit department of a large European Bank was looking to centralise legal content that was spread across the department and the bank in multiple databases, and eliminate inefficiencies in their content updating process. Instead of their fragmented and largely manual way of working, they required reliable and consistent legal content, centrally accessible to all who needed it. Rapid, standardised production and distribution of contract updates, including an Audit trail for regulatory oversight were key requirements. Additionally, our client was looking for a solution with the flexibility to be seamlessly extended to their Asset Based Finance department, and provide the foundation for additional departments and countries in the future.
Shareforce solution
The client was able to achieve its objective with Shareforce’s turnkey Enterprise Legal Content Management solution. Shareforce is driven by a clause-component database (a granular contract building-block library) that is fully controlled by legal staff and is used for each legal document by all employees, departments, countries and systems; other departments can be ‘plugged in’ very easily and quickly. This database serves as the ‘single source of truth’ for our client, providing the uniformity and consistency of content our client was after. Updates can be made in minutes and are instantly distributed to all systems and legal documents, eliminating manual distribution and offering content compliance to the whole organisation. All edits and approvals to content are logged, providing a full audit trail.
Impact
- Shareforce Legal Content Management serves as the ‘single source of truth’ clause-component database, contains all of the corporate credit department’s legal content and provides the foundation for incremental departments, simply by adding new users.
- Shareforce enables the client’s lawyers to automatically distribute updates to all relevant templates and signed contracts; at the touch of a button, our client is compliant, avoiding errors, fines and remediation actions. All content updates and changes are logged in an Audit Trail.
- Shareforce gives lawyers direct control over content updates and remediation, eliminating reliance on IT functions and lengthy change cycles, cutting IT costs by approximately 75% and streamlining document updating cycles.
Client Challenge
A Digital Bank, with a business model built to grow using technology & efficiency, was lacking an integrated legal content management and document generation solution for their loan contracting processes. The existing manual solution was not set up for scalable growth, and differed country by country, leading to inefficiencies. The client required a multi-language solution with the ability to connect to the client’s Core lending system.
Shareforce Solution
Implement one, firm-wide, Clause-component Database for all countries, departments and systems. Shareforce’s No-code Automated Document Creation offers quick, safe and flexible drafting in MS Word, catering to standardized loans and bespoke loans, simplifying the contracting processes, eliminating duplication. Client’s lawyers are in control of keeping contract data up-to-date, increasing contract quality, governance & compliance, eliminating reliance on IT to update systems and thereby saving costs.
Impact
- Our client increased contract output multiple times without increasing the headcount of the legal and contract team enabling them to accelerate growth for the bank.
- Shareforce’s language-agnostic legal content management solution created the perfect foundation to efficiently add legal teams in additional countries.
- Our client was able to reduce spending on external counsel: large parts of their manual processes were replaced by our superior automated processes allowing their own lawyers to focus on higher value work.
Client Challenge
A large European Bank had an incumbent, ineffective document assembly software solution that was no longer servicing the needs of the company and needed replacing. The legacy solution was positioned as a “DIY for Lawyers” solution but in reality was very complicated to use, didn’t offer the contract drafting flexibility our client required and needed IT expertise to automate content. As a result, the level of document automation of the legacy solution was only 50%. This meant significant manual input from the legal team was still required, substantially reducing their time to focus on higher value tasks.
Importantly, the new solution needed to be integrated with their existing Salesforce-based loan origination system to reduce the amount of manual work of their lawyers to an absolute minimum when it came to drafting bespoke, complex contracts.
Shareforce Solution
Shareforce solved both of our client’s requirements. By implementation of our Automated Document Creation solution, their lawyers generate tailor-made documents efficiently by using ‘automated’ contract building blocks. No coding, or knowledge of programming languages is required: users simply select options to generate bespoke, complex contracts. As a result, virtually all contract content is now automated and available for their legal team for consistent, fast and automated legal document generation.
Secondly, Shareforce directly integrates with the client’s loan origination system and maps, retrieves and uses all relevant data from the loan origination system into Shareforce’s Automated Document Creation solution to generate bespoke, compliant, near-final contracts in MS Word.
Impact
- Shareforce replaced and vastly improved the pre-Shareforce setup; documents are now 100% automated. Users have full flexibility, from drafting their initial document to any subsequent versions: even manual changes in MS Word are retained and accessible in all successive versions.
- Shareforce automatically retrieves data from our client’s loan origination system and uses the data to auto-generate custom (complex) contracts. This eliminates many manual process steps, increasing speed, accuracy and connectivity to any existing apps that use the contract.
- Auto-generating custom contracts achieves time savings of more than 80% for the lawyers, which allows them to focus on higher value work. This reduces dependency on outside counsel and greatly accelerates the speed to market of the lending department.
Shareforce offers:
Increased Productivity
A turn-key solution that serves as the ‘single source of truth’ for each lawyer and legal document. One, firm-wide, exhaustive clause-component database for all countries, departments (e.g. Retail, Wholesale, CIB) and systems (i.e. loan origination, procurement), that becomes the catalyst for all your contracts. No-code Automated Document Creation offers quick, safe and flexible drafting in MS Word.
Lower IT costs for legal content
Legal experts have full control over the clause-component database. Legal content is originated, automated, maintained and deployed much faster throughout a firm, without the need for IT staff. Avoid delays, reduce the number of applications needed and offer legal staff the broadest flexibility.
Reduced regulatory costs & reduced risk of fines
Use our workflow tools to update contracts securely and efficiently with the ever-growing regulations that the industry must comply with, decreasing regulatory risk and costs. Re-papering, also of your legacy contracts, becomes vastly easier and substantially quicker, potentially saving millions.
Actionable Insights from Contract Data
By building contracts digitally from inception, based on granular building blocks, contract data in every part of your legal documents is accessible. Shareforce is also able to unlock and extract data from legacy (pre-Shareforce) contracts. Our platform extracts contract data from PDF, MS Word & many other formats, as well as using API’s. Having the ability to analyse contract data at its deepest level from legacy documents (T-1) and documents created in Shareforce (T+1) in one platform is a truly unique offer.
Jasper Boersma
Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)
For questions, please contact me directly:
E. jasper.boersma@shareforcelegal.com
Or reach out to us via our contact form.