Why a Financial Services Technology Firm Selected Leah for Multi-Tier Approval Automation Across 100 Users
A financial services technology firm, a Philippines-based technology services and consulting company serving Banking, Financial Services, Insurance (BFSI) and Commercial Sales sectors, faced significant operational inefficiencies in their contract management processes. Operating across multiple time zones with teams in the Philippines and Singapore, the organization relied heavily on Google Docs and Google Drive for managing contracts across their 100-user organization spanning legal, sales, product management, solution consultants, and service delivery teams.
“We just needed to eliminate this workflow of downloading, editing offline, and re-uploading. We wanted to keep all document editing within the platform to avoid breaking version control.”
Implementation Project Lead, A Financial Services Technology Firm
Challenge
A financial services technology firm, a Philippines-based technology services and consulting company serving Banking, Financial Services, Insurance (BFSI) and Commercial Sales sectors, faced significant operational inefficiencies in their contract management processes. Operating across multiple time zones with teams in the Philippines and Singapore, the organization relied heavily on Google Docs and Google Drive for managing contracts across their 100-user organization spanning legal, sales, product management, solution consultants, and service delivery teams.
The manual approach created substantial workflow challenges. Team members had to download files from systems, edit them offline, and re-upload versions—a process that consistently broke version control. When solution consultants and sales executives needed to work on different sections of proposals simultaneously, they couldn't. Sequential handoffs between technical teams and commercial teams created delays in getting proposals to clients.
The approval process required manual coordination across a complex hierarchy: solution consultants, solution consultant leads, Centers of Excellence heads for different technical domains (cloud infrastructure, project management, software quality), service delivery heads and directors, account managers, finance, and authorized signatories. Without systematic routing, contracts moved through this multi-tier structure inefficiently.
The organization had no automated reminders for contract renewals and expirations, requiring manual tracking across their contract portfolio. Management explicitly pushed for automation, wanting to avoid adding manual steps to existing processes. With approximately 100 users needing access across multiple departments and business divisions, the challenges of their manual Google Workspace-based approach had become untenable.
Solution Search
A financial services technology firm needed a CLM platform that could handle sophisticated workflow requirements while maintaining the collaboration capabilities their teams valued in Google Workspace. Their evaluation criteria focused on several must-have capabilities that would address their specific operational complexity.
The solution needed to support multi-entity workflows with conditional routing based on business context. Different service types required different reviewers and approvers throughout the contract lifecycle. The platform had to intelligently route contracts based on paper source (internal the firm templates versus third-party papers), sector selection (commercial sales versus government), and deal complexity—all without requiring manual intervention.
The firm required flexibility in approval hierarchies. Some stages needed parallel approvals where any one approver could advance the workflow. Others required unanimous approval or the ability for a single rejection to break the cycle. The contract administration team needed discretionary authority to choose between multiple workflow pathways after initial review: initiating additional legal approvals, proceeding to counterparty negotiation, or moving directly to signature.
The organization wanted to preserve their existing collaboration model. Solution consultants and account managers needed the ability to edit documents simultaneously in different sections. The platform had to maintain Google Docs functionality while adding CLM-specific workflow automation. Integration with their existing technology stack—Google Workspace for collaboration and DocuSign for e-signatures—was essential.
Template automation capabilities were critical for supporting the firm's diverse contract portfolio. The solution needed to handle NDAs, Master Service Agreements, Partnership Agreements, Statements of Work, and both technical and commercial proposals—each with different workflow requirements and approval chains. The platform had to support conditional logic in templates and accommodate varying service offerings across their Centers of Excellence structure.
Role-based access controls were non-negotiable. Different stakeholders needed different platform capabilities: administrators required broad repository visibility and bulk edit capabilities, full users needed requester access to create and manage contracts, business users needed view-only access to specific records, and approvers needed the ability to provide go/no-go decisions with comments but without editing capabilities.
The firm also needed a partner who could support a phased implementation approach. With 100 users across multiple departments and five application types to configure, they required flexibility to launch in phases rather than attempting a big-bang rollout. The vendor needed to support iterative refinement—prioritizing speed to implementation over perfect initial design, with the understanding that templates and workflows would be optimized based on real-world usage.
“Since we're using our own pre-approved templates, we won't need to review that anymore so they can proceed freely. We can cut the process time significantly by skipping the review stage for our standard templates.”
Implementation Project Lead, A Financial Services Technology Firm
Why Leah
Leah won the evaluation based on its ability to address a financial services technology firm's sophisticated workflow requirements while supporting their phased adoption strategy.
The platform's conditional workflow routing capabilities were a decisive factor. Leah could route contracts based on multiple business criteria simultaneously—paper source, sector, complexity, service type—without requiring manual assignment. For example, the firm could configure workflows where internal templates bypass review stages and proceed directly to negotiation (cutting process time), while third-party papers follow the standard review workflow. Government sector contracts could automatically route to specific authorized signatories. This intelligent, criteria-based routing eliminated the manual coordination that had plagued their Google Docs-based process.
The platform's flexibility in approval logic addressed the firm's complex organizational structure. Leah supported their "any one approver" model for service delivery hierarchies, where notifications go to all relevant team members but only one approval is required. It accommodated stages requiring unanimous approval or allowing single rejections to break the cycle. The system gave the contract administration team discretionary authority to determine workflow pathways after initial review—a three-option decision model that became a core requirement during implementation discussions.
Leah's Google Docs integration preserved the collaboration capabilities the firm's teams valued while adding structured CLM workflows. Solution consultants and account managers could continue editing documents simultaneously in real-time, but now within a platform that provided workflow automation, version control, and audit trails. The platform maintained all Google Docs functionality while eliminating the download-edit-reupload cycle that had broken version control in their previous approach.
The template automation capabilities supported the firm's diverse contract portfolio. Leah's conditional logic, table fields, and custom field creation enabled sophisticated document assembly beyond simple clause insertion. The platform could handle the varying requirements across NDAs, MSAs, Partnership Agreements, SOWs, and complex proposals—each with different data requirements and approval chains. The document naming templates would help "sanitize naming" for documents, particularly third-party papers, addressing their document organization challenges.
Leah's approach to Key Legal Obligations (KLOs) offered another competitive advantage. The platform could be trained on the firm's specific contract clauses, enabling rapid contract review across high volumes without opening every document. For contracts with frequently changing clauses like stabilization sprints, client readiness, and risk factors affecting timelines, this capability would provide significant efficiency gains.
The vendor's support for phased implementation aligned with the firm's change management philosophy. Leah's team demonstrated flexibility in accommodating the firm's approach: launching Phase 1 with three contract types for the legal and commercial teams, then expanding to SOWs and Proposals in Phase 2. The vendor supported iterative refinement, helping the firm simplify initially overwhelming configuration options (reducing KLOs from 84 to 10 items, trimming intake form fields from 14 to 5-6) while maintaining the platform's power for future needs.
The implementation partnership quality factored into the decision. The vendor team demonstrated responsiveness to configuration questions, flexibility in scheduling to accommodate both teams' availability and Philippines holidays, and willingness to conduct ad-hoc calls beyond the weekly cadence to accelerate progress. They provided comprehensive training resources including user manuals, workflow guides, and video tutorials under three minutes for long-term platform ownership.
"All of the things that you've taught us, especially on creating templates, have been very useful. Our mutual NDA template, intake forms, and field mappings are all functioning exactly according to how we configured them."
— Implementation Project Lead, the firm
Leah's cognitive search capabilities and centralized repository with role-based access controls addressed the firm's need for both security and appropriate access. Administrators could perform bulk edits while business users had limited action permissions during review and negotiation stages. The platform's ability to provide automated 90-day reminders for contract expirations and renewals would eliminate the manual tracking that had created gaps in their contract lifecycle management.
With Leah's combination of sophisticated workflow automation, Google Workspace integration, template flexibility, and phased implementation support, the firm's contracts and legal team is positioned to transform their contract management processes across the organization's 100 users and multiple business divisions.
