How might we enable our business and support units to review and negotiate contracts more efficiently while ensuring robust risk governance?
Group Legal, Compliance & Secretariat (LCS)
Pactly is a contract review solution service provider that helps businesses and legal teams draft, review, and negotiate their most frequent contracts.
Many large enterprises deal with a huge volume of procurement and business contracts. Recognising that contract review is hitherto a time-consuming and tedious process, we set out to enhance our contract review journey to make the process more joyful for our stakeholders, with a focus on addressing employee pain points.
We asked ourselves, "How can we enable the Bank to review and negotiate contracts more efficiently to reduce time to contract execution while ensuring that the governance of legal, credit, business and operational risks are not compromised?"
In collaboration with our technology partner, Pactly, we have successfully developed a working proof of concept (POC) for a data-centric, automated contract review workflow. Generation of contracts can now be done by completing a simple questionnaire. Automated checks flag out common drafting errors, issues and deviations, and ensure that the contract adheres to the Bank’s minimum standards. This guided approach allows contract owners, who are non-legal users, to self-serve, independently review and negotiate contracts within predefined boundaries.
This new approach towards contract review is based on three fundamental principles:
To benefit the wider community who may experience similar pain points, DBS and Pactly co-authored a whitepaper detailing the POC experience and how we fast-tracked the development of a contract review process that is centred on the meaningful collection of data to support decision making and legal process optimisation. The paper also shares how a data-centric view towards contract negotiations provides significant efficiency gains while still ensuring robust risk governance. We have greatly benefited from this innovative collaboration and we hope our sharing will inspire our industry and peers to transform their contract review process.
Read the full whitepaper here.