Contracting is a huge, unsolved problem – especially for heavily regulated and complex financial services firms who have multiple jurisdictions and templates to juggle. Until these agreements are signed, clients cannot be onboarded and revenues will not flow. In spite of the mutual business case to sign agreements promptly months are often lost as red-lined Word documents pass back and forth on email with a limited audit trail of what clauses are changed, how often and why. There have been multi-billion dollar innovations in this segment so far, such as e-signatures, but the drafting and negotiation of agreements is still largely manual. We see an enormous opportunity for a company to improve processes, help firms to sign agreements faster (bringing forward revenue) and to free the immense volume of data trapped in these contracts. This was the part of the vision of the team at Arteria we were most excited by.

When broken down into its component parts, a contract is a series of data points. Each of these data points has specific conditions attached to it and can be leveraged within other parts of an organisation. The hard part is finding a way to translate the free text of a Word document (the legal world’s tool of choice) into data which does not alter the deeply embedded workflows on both sides of the table (emailing red-lines back and forth). This is the core of the Arteria product. As former legal professionals, the team at Arteria knew that this would be too big of an ask so designed a solution which would both allow free text negotiation, but have data capture at the core. By starting with the most complex use cases first, onboarding agreements for clients in financial markets, they have built an enterprise ready and scalable product which can handle the most demanding institutions. Their contracts with some of the world’s largest bulge bracket investment banks to handle highly complex agreements are testament to the strength of this product.