Streamlining legal and procurement operations at ING with self-service applications
ING is the third-largest bank in Germany, serving more than 9.5 million customers with over 6,000 employees. Every day new commercial relationships are considered and new contracts entered into. The procurement and corporate legal teams have huge volumes of requests, data, and agreements to consider, and ultimately business risk to manage. We spoke with Manfred Schick, General Counsel, and Gabriel Bärenz, Senior Legal Counsel, about how they use BRYTER to improve their operations and the service they provide to their commercial colleagues.
Make information easily accessible to the entire business
Gabriel explained the challenge many growing businesses face: “In scaling organizations like ING, there is always the challenge of finding the right information swiftly. BRYTER helps us to design our processes as transparently and seamlessly as possible, making information more accessible and enabling people to find the information they need, when they need it. This saves our time, our commercial colleagues’ time, and means we can provide a faster, better service.”
BRYTER helps us to design our processes as transparently and seamlessly as possible, making information more accessible and enabling people to find the information they need, when they need it. This saves our time, our commercial colleagues’ time and means we can provide a faster, better service.
Gabriel Bärenz, Senior Legal Counsel, ING
Gabriel explained that making this knowledge explicit, accessible and transparent is one of the key ways they use BRYTER to improve their operations. “By making information available through self-service applications we make it so much more accessible: available 24/7, and not reliant on someone in corporate legal or procurement being at their desk to pick up the phone.”
ING Germany’s corporate legal team uses BRYTER to gather information they need for keeping their contract database up to date. Gabriel explains: “Every day new contracts are entered into. As a legal team, we need to have the full-picture overview of each of those contracts to understand our risk. For example, we need to understand what regulatory requirements need to be considered.”
“Before BRYTER, a large portion of the process of managing our contract database was done manually. Using BRYTER we built self-service applications that help our commercial colleagues with finding the information they need, instead of having them go through this over the phone or in back-and-forth emails with someone in corporate legal. Consequently, BRYTER doesn’t just save our time, it saves our business colleagues’ time as well,” explains Manfred.
Gabriel further explained, “Understandably our commercial colleagues may not know what response to give to a particular legal or regulatory question. With BRYTER we are providing guidance to those questions so that it makes it easier for our commercial colleagues to provide the correct information.”
Improving collaboration with the commercial business
In addition to saving time, applications built with BRYTER have had a broader business benefit. “BRYTER has facilitated better collaboration between the legal and procurement teams and the rest of the business,” explained Manfred. “We use BRYTER to get the information we need from business units to the legal and procurement teams in a fast and efficient way.”
A key feature of BRYTER is how easy and intuitive it is to use. It is a low threshold to start using, making it easy for professionals like lawyers to overcome the obstacle of using technology in their day-to-day business.
Manfred Schick, General Counsel, ING
And when it comes to saving time, an important factor is how long it actually takes to build these applications. “A key feature of BRYTER is how easy and intuitive it is to use. It is a low threshold to start using, making it easy for professionals like lawyers to overcome the obstacle of using technology in their day-to-day business,” explains Manfred. “BRYTER enables us to easily automate repetitive tasks.”
And the value of this automation doesn’t just translate into a better functioning team, but also efficiency. As Manfred explained: “We used to spend quite some time on addressing the manual tasks in our team. With BRYTER, we can automate this, which means we’re better able to use our resource with more complex and individual tasks.”
What next?
Manfred and Gabriel are constantly improving the legal and procurement operations, and continue to get inspired by the BRYTER product and team. “One thing we value about BRYTER is the market knowledge they bring to the table. They are not just another software company; they understand us and the challenges we face as legal, procurement and regulatory teams,” explains Gabriel.
Looking forward, the ING team plans to build a matter intake management application and leverage the industry integrations available with BRYTER. All of this will undoubtedly save them even more time and further streamline their processes, as they continue to best utilize their resource and collaborate with the rest of the commercial business.