Icertis continues to add industry-specific solutions for the Icertis Contract Intelligence platform. Following the launch of Healthcare earlier this year, it has now released Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) for Banking and Financial Services (BFSI). The new solution is targeted at financial institutions, banks and insurance companies. It aims to automate the processes behind the creation of such documents as lending terms and conditions, investment banking and trading agreements, insurance policies or third-party supplier commitments. Icertis BFSI helps organisations connect the silos of information to increase efficiency, increase revenue and uncover new opportunities.
The solution helps connect the front, middle, and back offices with workflows that help improve compliance and regulatory processes such as AML, KYC, ISDA credit support, and credit risk reviews. The functionality is built on the experience Icertis gained working with some of the world’s leading banking and financial institutions, such as Allianz, DenizBank, Jefferies, and Wex. At DenizBank in 2019, Icertis helped the company to digitize and centralise all its contracts so that they are available from anywhere in the world.
Aydin Catalabas, Project Manager in Digital Transformation at DenizBank, commented, “We wanted to work with a company that is familiar with operations in the region and in Turkey and who has the contract experience in these specific fields. DenizBank selected Icertis since it is digitizing its contract management process, allowing it to gain transparency into its current and past contracts.”
From this and other customers, Icertis has built a module that will accelerate tie to value for other businesses in the sector. The solution is now available worldwide for banking and financial services institutions.
Catalabas added, “The main benefit that we expect from the implementation of ICI is effective follow-up on DenizBank contracts.” Catalabas has since left DenizBank.
ICI for Banking and Financial Services
The solution has taken the learnings from implementations worldwide and enables organisations to create and manage contracts such as treasury management, repo loan contracts, and custody agreements. Once created, the centralised repository and supporting analytics enable organisations to better understand the impact of regulatory changes and execute updates where required. The solution helps reduce risks, improve compliance and surface revenue opportunities.
The solution already includes predefined (though customisable) workflows for several banking and financial services agreements, including:
- Blocked account management to support the complexity of managing non-performing assets
- Treasury management to facilitate the creation of treasury management services
- The creation of engagement and reservation of rights letters for mergers and acquisitions
- Global custody management to generate custody agreements to meet the specific needs of each relationship and streamline negotiations and approvals
- Trading agreements, including ISDA master agreements, schedules, credit support annexes, and repurchase loan agreements
Niranjan Umarane, Executive Vice President of Product Management, at Icertis commented, “Top banks and financial institutions are thinking differently about how contracts impact their businesses in every way. They are navigating evolving competition, heightened oversight and increasing regulations, complex investments, and operational efficiencies. Contract intelligence plays an important role across these trends; powering, protecting, and accelerating business. Icertis recognized the need to address the many contracting pain points central to banking and financial services and have taken our core ICI platform to create a comprehensive solution for quick deployment and adoption without trade-offs on risk and compliance. The solution accelerates contracting processes, improves client onboarding, reduces risk, improves regulatory and reporting compliance, and increases revenue growth.”
ICI Benefits
Icertis notes several benefits:
- Establish efficient, consistent contracting with a single, accessible platform to create, negotiate, and approve all contracts
- Harness all contract data with deep insights across contracts, including self-service analysis of existing agreements and external documents
- Increase business velocity by streamlining all banking and financial services contracts with built-in use cases
- Meet “TRPM” requirements (third-party risk management) and manage supplier volume with end-to-end contract lifecycle management
- Reduce revenue leakage and maximize the value of spend by ensuring cross-region alignment with agreed terms, further supported by SAP/procurement system integration
- Minimize regulatory compliance risk with ICI obligation management, including rules to generate obligations and the ability to search-and-find clauses impacted by regulatory updates
- Track contractual deviations in real-time with visibility into variance from contract norms to assist with negotiation and approvals
- Drive process compliance with automated workflows and obligation management during counterparty, market, or internal events such as defaults or changes of control
- Increase efficiency and speed with the ability to mass amend agreements without legal outsourcing or internal resource time
- Support for common contract types, such as NDA, MSA, SaaS agreements, real estate services, and termination letters, enable corporate functions like procurement to manage the complexity related to the high volume of third-party suppliers
Industry vertical approach
Icertis continues to develop its industry-specific solutions. It is not the first company to do so, platform vendors realise they need to create industry-specific solutions to understand and develop a faster return on investments for their solutions. Icertis is inexorably building out the ICI platform, adding different use cases for different industries. The cadence of releases is likely to increase as the many industries overlap. It now has solutions for Consulting & IT Services, Healthcare, Medical Technology, Technology, and Wholesale & Distribution.
Igor Stenmark, Managing Director of MGI Research, explains the reason behind this launch, saying, “According to our research, the total addressable market (TAM) for cloud-based Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software will expand rapidly from over $4.1 billion in 2022 to over $8 billion in 2026, representing a Cumulative Aggregate Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.4% and totaling close to $30 billion over the five years.
“Financial services organizations of all stripes – from retail and commercial banks to insurance providers and capital market participants stand to benefit significantly from modern CLM solutions that can help accelerate their digital transformation, optimize costs, and improve client engagement and service. Leading financial services providers seek to take advantage of out-of-box CLM capabilities to remove friction from key business processes – from loan origination to M&A to compliance management, among others. With a focus on contract intelligence, Icertis is well-positioned to address numerous contractual management pain points of global and regional financial institutions.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
With a solution prepared for another specific industry sector and one that is already embracing digitisation and with relatively deep pockets, this could be the golden ticket for Icertis. Many organisations face the same challenges that Denizbank faced with manual repositories and a lack of oversight.
The Icertis solution not only stores the contracts but will also digitise them, potentially opening millions of contracts for automated review. The potential savings and revenue opportunities for financial institutions are massive. For insurance companies, understanding what clauses are absent or present from contracts can significantly affect the bottom and top lines.
With BFSI now launched, not complete, as Icertis will continue to develop the functionality as the use cases increase. What is next? Will it tackle private equity and fund management? Or will it look to extend the solution to a new sector?
