Leading Investment Bank Saves Hundreds of Hours Annually With Ontra

Challenge

NDA processing for investment bank sell-side transactions causes internal overload

As the global investment bank scaled up growth and operations, it became clear that the old way of managing NDAs for sell-side transactions no longer made sense. The bank needed to find a new way to manage NDA processes.

Before Ontra, the firm would ask its bankers to work with in-house counsel to manage the NDA process under the supervision of its clients’ counsel, while the bankers were running all other aspects of the marketing phase. Or the firm would ask its clients to take on the entirety of NDA negotiation.

In the latter scenario, clients would often rely on their outside deal counsel, distracting them from other important work required for the transaction and incurring high costs.

Requiring bankers to manage the NDA process was never an ideal solution. Bankers are tasked with the high-value work that leads to a successful transaction outcome and investment banks do not provide legal advice. As the bank grew and managed more deals, concerns increased among those whose core capabilities did not include processing and managing sell-side NDAs. Notably, the process took bankers and internal counsel away from higher-value work, sometimes for hours per NDA, with dozens of NDAs in most processes—totaling hundreds of hours annually.

“We were outgrowing internal capabilities and needed a partner to scale alongside us. We are not a law firm, so we can’t provide legal advice or match law firm capabilities, and bankers aren’t best suited to do that job in any case.” Investment Bank Deputy General Counsel

It soon became clear that the existing processes could not scale with the firm’s growth. The inefficiencies, lack of scalability, and personnel overload during the marketing phase of a deal pulled bankers away from focusing on their core responsibilities. The continually increasing volume put significant demands on in-house capabilities, leading to potential bottlenecks.

“Scalability was a big factor in choosing Ontra. As the firm grew, we realized we couldn’t scale up with the existing process for managing NDAs, and it wasn’t feasible or appropriate to try to match the capabilities of a law firm internally.” Investment Bank Deputy General Counsel

Rapid growth and the desire to find a solution provider that could grow with the team and allow bankers to dedicate their focus to delivering the best possible transaction outcome and client experience led the investment bank’s leadership to seek a better solution. At first, they considered outsourcing legal providers or expanding the support team internally. However, neither of those solutions solved the firm’s need for lower costs, reduced risk, faster sell-side negotiations, and improved consistency, visibility, flexibility, and scalability.

The investment bank’s leadership team learned about Ontra’s unique solution through negotiations with buy-side firms, anecdotally through positive feedback from those using the platform, and through its global network of experienced lawyers. In 2017, the firm first implemented Ontra as its sell-side NDA solution and has continued to scale operations with Ontra since then.

“We considered outsourcing legal providers but found that Ontra was more compelling as it was purpose-built for sell-sides.” Investment Bank Deputy General Counsel

Solution

Ontra delivers sell-side efficiency, cost savings, scalability, and peace of mind for NDA processing

Before adopting Ontra, the bank’s clients would either use expensive outside counsel for sell-side NDAs or rely on the investment bank to manage the process with the client’s internal legal team’s involvement. Regardless of how the NDAs were administered, the process was time-consuming and expensive, slowing down sell-side deals.

Using Ontra, the internal time it takes to process an NDA has been reduced dramatically. Significantly, the firm doesn’t incur the costs of extra internal personnel, eliminating overhead for services that are not in the bank’s core competencies. Ontra’s consumption-based pricing has helped the bank align costs to use and need.

“If there are periods of less activity, we don’t have a fixed cost around that—Ontra is a flexible solution that flexes with the business demands.” Investment Bank Deputy General Counsel

To ensure a seamless transition to its automated solution, Ontra established a workflow process that included an account to give the bankers oversight into each sell-side project and matched the bank with an experienced and dedicated team of lawyers through its network. Additionally, Ontra worked with the investment bank to create training materials and a hands-on training program.

“Ontra is a reliable partner that provides a very efficient, cost-effective, and scalable solution that has helped support our growth.” Investment Bank Deputy General Counsel

In tandem with Ontra’s Contract Automation platform, the bank’s dedicated legal team surfaced relevant precedents and data reporting on past outcomes to inform client parameter sheets—ensuring consistency with precedents and client-preferred clauses and facilitating the development of future starting negotiation positions for client review.

The roll-out was successful, and by 2020, Ontra was managing NDAs for the large majority of the sell-side processes the bank brought to market. To support the bank’s expanding use, Ontra created materials to educate the bank’s clients and provided training for new hires and first-time users.

For the last eight years, the investment bank has used Ontra to process, negotiate, and manage its NDAs for sell-side transaction processes. From start to finish, Ontra’s AI-powered software and global network of experienced lawyers have turned the sell-side NDA process into a plug-and-play solution for bankers and legal counsel.

“Ontra creates a seamless process between bankers and clients throughout the transaction. We can negotiate dozens of NDAs in a compressed time frame—quickly moving projects from the marketing phase to due diligence.” Investment Bank Deputy General Counsel

Ontra’s flexible solution has successfully met the business demands of the investment bank and its clients. The AI-powered human-in-the-loop solution gets buyers through the contract process faster and with less friction. Bankers are completing the marketing phase and moving into due diligence more efficiently and painlessly than before, focusing more on value-added work and contributing to business performance and efficiency.

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