Customer
Perpetual Limited
About
Perpetual Group is a diversified financial services company which has been serving Australians since 1886 when it was established as a trustee company by a group of businessmen including Sir Edmund Barton, later to be Australia's first Prime Minister. That trustee heritage - and the culture it created in putting clients first - is what makes Perpetual unique.
Sector
Financial Services
The Problem
"We execute a lot of documents in our role as a trustee... You could be looking at pretty lengthy documents and quite manual review and approval processes."
Perpetual needed to review documents before signature for critical business risks; its existing process relied on expert staff to find clauses hidden in long documents. A manual process was also:
- Limiting visibility of work and utilisation, resulting in difficulty allocating resources in the team and between clients.
- Increasing time spent on low-value document review tasks.
- Preventing the collection of a more detailed audit trail, informing future decision-making and ensuring that decisions were based on transparent criteria.
The Solution
Lext developed a centralised tool to automate the review and approval process by:
- Automating repetitive, high-volume document review tasks.
- Standardising Perpetual's document review process.
- Providing transparent, auditable workflows with a log of every decision made about a document prior to execution.
- Robust tracking and reporting on review status, time-to-completion, utilisation, and performance.
- Supporting criteria-based decision-making to ensure compliance and mitigate risk.
"I was surprised that it had actually only taken... 4 to 5 months... from ideation to full development of this tool... that was something that we were always amazed about; how quickly that happened."
– Teresa Chan | Head of Client Management, Fiduciary and Managed Funds Solutions
The Impact
Our solution removed some of the key roadblocks Perpetual was experiencing.
In the first month of the solution being live, the platform completed over 2,500 document compliance checks, decreasing the risk of errors and freeing up human expert time to spend on more complex cases.
Lext also introduced 'events', or key steps in the review process which are logged for observability. Events can be tracked in real-time in an event-driven workflow management system, and can be used as an audit trail to understand historical decisions.
"We are seeing a material time saving now."
– James McNeil | Senior Client Services Manager
- Material time savings
- Enhanced control environment
- Better transparency
- Novel business workflows
"I would 100% recommend Lext. They were excellent to work with and we're viewing them as a long term partner."
– Phil Blackmore | Chief Risk Officer
