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With over 325 years of history and expertise in banking, this leading multinational bank operates in over 40 countries and employs over 83,000 people. This British multinational universal bank moves, lends, invests and protects money for customers and clients worldwide.
With such a wide range of products on offer, the British multinational universal bank has hundreds of sets of terms and conditions to keep updated for its customers. However, the process they followed to do so was highly manual, with Legal spending a disproportionate amount of their time handling these updates on top of their demanding day jobs.
By partnering with TLB, the British multinational universal bank was able to reduce Legal’s manual work by 50% by introducing a completely automated process, not only significantly reducing risk associated.
We kicked off with a detailed Discovery session to find out more about the bank’ ‘Contract Arrangements Policy’ and how it had been implemented to date.
The policy required that, on an annual basis, each Business Owner confirm whether or not the terms and conditions for their product were still in use and, on a biennial basis, Legal update the terms to reflect changes to law or the product.
We identified various issues with this process which made it lengthy, prone to error and difficult to audit. Firstly, the process was managed manually by Legal via a spreadsheet. Secondly, the terms and conditions were not stored directly within the spreadsheet, but had to be located when it came to review.
Thirdly, the spreadsheet was often checked out by various users, which led to version control issues. Finally, email was relied on for approvals of template updates, which were manually saved for audit trail purposes.
Based on what we’d discovered, any new solution we designed needed to do four things:
- Significantly reduce manual work
- Eliminate version control issues
- Ensure correct accountability between the Business and Legal
- Improve audit trail tracking
We wanted to leverage the Bank’s existing technology stack to avoid lengthy procurement cycles and adoption issues so we designed a solution using Sharepoint and Power Automate which did the following:
Centralised database
We set up a centralised database on Sharepoint of all of the terms and conditions, their owners, review dates and statuses. This meant everyone was able to access this live version at the same time, removing any version control issues.
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Automated email updates
As review dates approached, the Business and Legal Owners would receive email updates informing them of what actions were required. For some notification types, the owner could simply confirm whether or not a template was in use from directly within Outlook, without even going into the centralised database. This also meant Legal was not responsible for driving the process via email - this all happened automatically.
Automated status updates and calendar view
The status of each template (whether it was live or under review) updated automatically, meaning no one needed to manually manage this. We also built a calendar view, giving Business and Legal Owners the ability to look ahead for upcoming updates so they could plan their workload.
Digitised audit trial
All updates to templates were dealt with from directly within Sharepoint, with relevant users tagged within the templates for approvals where necessary. This meant that no emails needed to be saved manually: the audit trail of changes and approvals was automatically stored within the database.
Having developed the solution above and tested it within the Legal team, we rolled this out to the business more broadly, with training materials and sessions to accompany it.
The result was an 85% reduction in manual steps for annual reviews, and 65% reduction for biennial reviews. This represented a huge time saving for both Legal and the Business and resulted in the British multinational universal bank’s legal team winning an internal award for their transformation efforts.