Investment Bank
Introduction
As one of the world's largest independent financial advisory groups, employing over 4000 people in 40 countries across the world, our client had a vast number of contracts to grapple with. With a small Legal team, BAU procurement contracts were often deprioritised, with Legal required to work on strategic matters for the bank.
In order to better manage these contracts, the bank’s Procurement team embarked on a transformation journey: implementing technology to improve regulatory reporting and contractual obligation tracking and working closely with Legal to identify opportunities to optimise their contracting workflow.
As part of that exercise, the bank made a strategic decision to partner with TLB to outsource their supplier contract review negotiation end-to-end and optimise their tech stack, processes and templates in the process.
Step 1: Discovery
To begin with, we kicked off with a detailed in-person Discovery workshop to understand more about the bank’s stakeholder landscape, contract types, risk appetite, preferred contract positions, and general contract management processes.
Having supported the bank previously in the implementation planning for their chosen CLM tool, we understood their tech landscape well. During Discovery therefore, our Ops team spent time with Procurement to understand where the implementation was currently at, any pain points and their overall objectives, enabling us to create a bespoke plan of action to achieve those objectives.
Step 2: Set-up
Playbooks
Following Discovery, we tailored our TLB Standard Playbook to suit the bank’s preferred positions, complete with fallback positions, risk threshold matrix and approvals matrix. We also developed a bespoke playbook for certain data agreements we would be handling.
IT Integration
Given the sensitive nature of the bank’s business, we got ourselves set up on the bank’s systems, including Sharepoint, Teams and their CLM system, to seamlessly handle contract reviews and communications with the team.
Templates
With a limited number of templates currently in place, we recommended a number of templates that the bank could implement (and which we could provide) to reduce reliance on third party paper and speed up negotiations. We also recommended associated value and risk thresholds to implement in order to enhance business self-service for certain contract types.
Legal Ops Diagnostics Report
We delivered our Legal Ops Diagnostic Report, setting out our recommendations as to how to optimise their processes and tech stack more broadly. This included a dedicated plan of action to improve and expand the use of their CLM system to achieve their overall objectives.
Step 3: Delivery
Contract Management
Procurement started sending us contracts from day 1, which we turned around on a 1-3 day SLA basis, ensuring at all times that the bank’s specific relevant regulatory, compliance and data protection requirements were being met in their contracts. We liaised directly with stakeholders and counterparties as needed to relieve Legal and Procurement of their BAU contracting burden completely.
CLM Optimisation
We worked with the bank to implement recommended changes to their CLM system to fully optimise its use and achieve the bank’s risk and regulatory reporting objectives.
Reporting
We kept Procurement in the loop with weekly WIP reports on their consumption, so they could simply and easily manage budgets.
On a monthly basis, we provided them with insights into and trends concerning their contract landscape, and held monthly supplier management meetings to ensure the bank was completely satisfied with our support.
Finally, we provided continuous improvement recommendations in the form of our Quarterly Optimisation Reports. This included recommendations related to their tech stack, templates, processes and playbook positions to continuously enhance their speed to contract, better manage spend and remove any friction in their processes.
The Outcome
By partnering with TLB, the bank saw their contract throughput increase by 80% and their contracting efficiency increase by 30%, by removing bottlenecks and ensuring precious Legal and Procurement resources were being deployed where the bank needed them most.