If the world is an oyster, airplanes are the TARDIS, and airports are the veritable blue box (from Doctor Who) – mostly noisy and often claustrophobic. The airport experience is rarely pleasant. Anxiety and stress are common due to flight delays, check-in hassles, seating arrangements (or rather, the lack of them), Wi-Fi problems, and more. This can be distracting for many passengers who would like some quiet time.

An airport lounge is an ideal place to relax and recharge. With free food and drinks, Wi-Fi enabled workstations, and clean facilities, travelers can take advantage of these amenities to unwind or catch up on work. Additionally, the lounge provides a networking opportunity with colleagues and friends. For those who desire a highly personalized or exclusive experience, the Polaris lounge (United Airlines) or Lufthansa’s super exclusive First-Class Terminal offer even more luxurious amenities such as a full bar, cigar lounge, plush sofas, buffet, and salon.

Now, a big pause! Many of you may be wondering if this is a build-up for Premier Lounges or the credit card companies that sell them. The answer is – no, it is not! This is about the parallel between the plight of passengers whose flight gets delayed or cancelled and the fintech’s journey in recent times. While travelers can recharge themselves at airport lounges, financial lounges like Magic FinServ can help fintechs recharge by providing super exclusive, hassle-free, and streamlined services. Magic FinServ’s advisory services and technology solutions can boost the pace of modernization/transformation by a significant 10X times.

The Many Stressors of Fintechs

Similar to how travelers face many stressors such as connecting flights, delayed and cancelled flights, fintech companies can also experience frayed nerves, especially when struggling with legacy workflows, redundant tools and technologies, unending migration problems, data swamps, and potential industry- wide disruptions caused by unexpected forces such as generative AI. Additionally, they must account for past mistakes such as overspending, which has resulted in big banks failing one after the other. The latest to bite the dust is First Republic.

If you are a fintech or financial services provider struggling to keep up with the massive disruptions occurring in the world today and are looking for a way to de-stress and energize, a Financial Lounge is what you need. A financial lounge is perfect for de-stressing your cluttered, siloed workflows and legacy engines from decades ago. Let us explore how.

Welcome to Magic FinServ! The Financial Lounge for FinTechs and Financial Services

1. Beat the Stress
   • Managing financial data is one of the biggest challenges faced by fintechs and financial services. It is complicated as it involves a lot of sensitive information. Another significant challenge is compliance. Fintechs must stay up to date with the latest standards and work with regulators to ensure that all obligations are met in a timely manner. However, organizations no longer need to worry about these challenges as Magic FinServ can get them up to date.
   • We can help you prioritize data security and privacy, maintain accurate and up-to-date records, and ensure that data is easily accessible and actionable using the cloud and our AI and ML- enabled solution.
   • We can help you streamline your workflows quickly and assist you in embracing disruption.
   • DeepSight^TM analyzes vast amounts of data in real-time for use cases such as risk management, fraud detection, AML, KYC, portfolio management, regulatory compliance (Shareholding and voting rights, ESG, T+1, investment and fund monitoring and reporting).
   • You can also count on our team of AI and Machine Learning specialists and FinTech engineers to identify gaps and provide sound advice on how you can leverage technology such as AI to speed up your processes at minimum costs.
2. Relax and Recharge while our bespoke AI platform crunches numbers faster than Speedy Gonzales
   • Rest and relaxation are important for both physical and mental well-being. Like airport lounges offer a place to unwind and recharge during a stressful time, Magic FinServ’s financial services acts as financial lounge for fintechs providing them with the needed “rest” and allowing them to focus on their core business. Our tools and services can help fintechs manage their finances with ease and confidence. Here is how
   • For humans, sleep is more than a biological requirement. It helps them recharge their batteries for another day of work. However, because of the existence of multiple time zones when markets are alive and active in one part of the world, our analysts weary and tired after a full day of work could be fast asleep, missing several critical incidents in another part of the world. So, when they come back to work the next day, they have their hands full. Most of the work that they would be required to do to keep the processes up to date would be of a manual sort, such as data entry, uploading and downloading files. Making the analyst feel tired like Jack – because all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
   • Now you can slay stress and be up-to-date faster than it takes to say I do! Unlike humans, our AI- powered platform does not need any sleep at all. So, while you are fast asleep, our powerful AI-powered solutions are deep at work automating facets of operations that were time-taking and tedious, ensuring that when you come fresh to work the next day, you only have to fine tune or take a summary, as the rest has been taken care of by AI.
3. Experience a Seamless Transition
   Passengers go through an agonizing period when they wait for a connecting flight, and fintech companies experience a similar sense of anxiety while awaiting the results of cloud migration and modernization efforts. However, with financial lounges such as Magic FinServ, the desired transformation can now be achieved more quickly. Our three-step approach for cloud migration includes:
   • Conducting a cost-benefit analysis with the help of our dedicated cloud team. This analysis takes into account the costs of migration and ongoing maintenance, as well as the savings that organizations can expect to see.
   • Optimizing the cloud environment with the use of automation and orchestration tools.
   • Utilizing cloud-native services such as containerization and managed databases to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
4. Utilize Time Profitably
   • In today’s fast-paced world, time is a valuable commodity. Similar to how airport lounges with workspaces allow travelers to catch up on work while waiting for their flights, our financial solutions enable fintech companies to leverage the power of AI and ML to stay prepared for any unforeseen consequences. By automating time-consuming and repetitive tasks, our solutions allow fintechs to focus on high-value work and take advantage of opportunities as they arise. This way, they can make the most of their time and operate with maximum efficiency, ultimately leading to increased profitability.
5. Remain Exclusive
   • People go to these lounges not only when their flights are delayed but also for novelty- it offers a unique experience. So it is for the financial services, we are their niche partner offering them the unique space to innovate and experiment. Because it has become apparent now that despite indications that recession may have set in finally, organizations, especially the bigger ones, are earnest about prolonging investment in moonshot projects. Some of the most common moonshot projects relate to robo- advisory, de-fi, embedded banking.
   • If you are keen on continuing moonshot projects, ensure STF and automation of back and middle-end processes first, because unless these two ends are unified and compatible, it would be unreliable to expect long-term benefits from other areas.

Magic FinServ: an Oasis for FinTech’s

In today’s fast-paced world, FinTech companies face numerous challenges that can impact their ability to succeed. From managing legacy workflows to keeping up with constantly evolving technologies and regulations, it can be challenging to stay ahead of the curve. That is where Magic FinServ comes in – as an oasis for FinTechs.

As experts in data and AI for FinTechs, Magic FinServ provides customized solutions that help companies manage the stress that comes with operating in this turbulent environment. We understand the unique challenges that FinTechs face and work with our clients to develop solutions that are tailored to their specific needs.

Our services act as a refuge for FinTechs, providing them with a much-needed break from the chaos that often surrounds their operations. Just as an oasis provides water and shade to travelers, Magic FinServ provides FinTechs with the support and resources they need to thrive in an ever-changing landscape.

Our clients can count on us to help them manage complex data sets, navigate legacy workflows, and keep up with the latest technologies and regulations. With Magic FinServ by their side, FinTechs can take on new challenges with confidence, knowing that they have a partner who understands their unique needs and can help them achieve their goals.

In conclusion, Magic FinServ serves as an airport lounge or oasis for FinTechs, providing the support and resources they need to navigate the challenges of the modern business world. With our expertise in data and AI, we help FinTechs manage the stress that comes with operating in a constantly evolving

landscape and enable them to thrive in the face of adversity. Contact us today at mail@magicfinserv.com to know more.

For most organizations, the lack of timely insights can make contract data management a nightmare. Without the necessary tools and technologies, many organizations can be caught off-guard when it comes to negotiations, execution, renewals, and termination of contracts. It is estimated that lack of timely insight into obligations and terms can result in revenue leakage of more than 9% annually. Source: (World Commerce and Contracting)

Whether it is Auto-Renewal, Termination, and in recent times Force Majeure, these clauses within the contract results in unnecessary diversion from business objectives, as the excessive reliance on the manual approach can only lead to unsavory incidents and disagreements between parties concerned.

No one would want that. The experts point out that an average Fortune 1000 company could handle several tens of thousands of contracts. Now if we were to consider the various stages of the contract management lifecycle – negotiations, execution, renewal and the multiple stakeholders involved – sales, finance, and legal teams, all this would simply mean that the amount of effort deployed (and expenses paid) to ensure streamlined operations would be huge. Source: (World Commerce and Contracting)

Hence in recent times, businesses have switched from the predominantly manual approach of contract data management to a more agile and technology-oriented perspective using automation, digitization, and robust data management (including meta data management) practices such as organizing a unique repository for each contract and curated database for locating a specific contract with ease. This shift provided organizations with a definite strategic advantage even during the pandemic, improved vendor relationships, enhanced visibility, and business gains as negotiations were conducted timely, while keeping at bay all possible risks.

So, if you are considering an overhaul to have better control over your contract data management, here are the 6 key players that could be a game changer for your organization.

5 key players of Contract Lifecycle Management

According to the latest forecast by Gartner, by 2023, artificial intelligence (AI) will enable 30% faster contract negotiation and document completion processes in organizations that deploy leading contract life cycle management (CLM) solutions. As a fintech or financial organization, you can still salvage the situation. For reports point out that the latest tools are enhanced with a version control mechanism and searchable repositories for arriving at the single source of truth with minimum effort and human intervention resulting in significant productivity improvement and reduction of sales cycles.

Digitizing data: Begin with the digitization of data. Keeping track of documents, the multiple edits that are incorporated from time to time, can be a tedious and wasteful exercise. Furthermore, with data existing in silos a nightmare situation can arise if stakeholders have multiple versions of the contract. In order to avoid contract nightmares, the first critical step is to digitize data. Whether public documents, emails, or paper agreements, digitize the contracts so that there is a single source of truth.

The 5 levers of transformation

When it comes to contract data management, the following technologies have a key role to play in its transformation. The following 5 levers of transformation supplant the slack/inefficiency associated with traditional manual contract data management and provide it with agility, visibility, accuracy, faster response times, and productivity.

Optical Character Recognition: Once organizations have proceeded with the digitization of the diverse document types, they must work out how they must extract relevant information from the volumes of data available because machines inherently lack the power to read them. Despite the variety of document types, and field types – names, dates, boilerplate text, different fonts, and even handwriting, OCR can read through it all and extract the relevant information faster in a standardized, streamlined fashion.

Natural Language Processing: The language used in contracts is complicated and legal in nature and can be best understood by professionals or the legal experts. A rule-based approach enables progressive understanding of the terms and the context, and organizations can even retain experts for relating and better understanding of context when it comes to ambiguous/difficult-to-understand terms and conditions.

Robotic Process Automation: Contract automation has been defined as the software to enable both legal and non-legal teams to self-serve on routine legal documents, at scale, without needing to involve lawyers every time. It can be described as the process of generating, managing, and storing contracts digitally to create a more efficient contract workflow. In order to bring about greater productivity and efficiency, we recommend automation of all tedious and repetitive data extraction tasks.

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence: No organization will like to miss the deadlines as there could be significant costs associated with it. Staying-up-to speed on contract renewals can seem like an uphill task, but with artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can ensure that your teams never miss an important obligation. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning comes streamlines the process for most organizations dealing with multiple contracts (big organizations juggle some 20,000 and 40,000 active contracts). Keeping up-to-date and abreast of the latest on a monthly or yearly basis would simply be impossible without the technology underlined above.

Taking control of contract management with Magic FinServ’s DeepSight^TM

We can help streamline contract data management. Ensure that there are no contract nightmares that ever cause organizations to pull in resources needlessly for firefighting. Here’s how we assure a smarter contract management powered with OCR, RPA, AI and ML.

Magic’s DeepSight^TM – the process optimization platform along with our Advisory practice provides a configured solution that acts as a virtual assistant to the analyst thereby reducing the complexity of the task. It automates standard processes to reduce errors and omissions and enables the less experienced and less skilled analysts to be able to perform their tasks.

How DeepSight^TM works?

Processing diverse documents: Service Provider Agreements vary by type of service; each service provider has its own unique terms and conditions. These documents have to be categorized according to type of service and for each service provider, relevant content identified and extracted

Unique folder for easier access and retrieval: Our solution not only identifies and segregates different documents but also files all documents for a particular service provider in the same folder to enable ease of access and retrieval.

Rules based: Magic DeepSight^TM solution incorporates business specific rules to identify relevant information and extract the same and update it in deal maintenance system after proper cleansing, enriching and transformation. Content extracted can be key value pairs, tables, or free flow content such as covenant clauses. If it is deal related, the key value pair is extracted. In the case of governance, contextual data is extracted and in deal maintenance details, combination of contextual and key value pairs are extracted which are all driven by the rules. Solution can go through the entire set of documents related to a particular deal including annexures, renewals, etc. to identify the latest terms and incorporate in the deal maintenance system.

But remember all this starts and ends with data. Data is the motherboard of contract lifecycle management. So as an organization we are in a unique position to aid data-driven transformations as we have the expertise, and the skill sets to deal with all your concerns. If you too would like to know, how we can be of help, contact us mail@magicfinserv.com.

The Future’s Getting Breathtakingly Simple

Before the Covid-19 pandemic, managing contracts was not an easy business. The legalese that contracts are clouded in, constitutes just a small fraction of the challenge that organizations face during contract management. The bigger challenge is the existence of contracts in diverse forms such as public websites, paper, emails, and ensuring that obligations are met in a timely manner so that there are no monetary losses or wranglings/disputes with the parties concerned later.

A change has been necessitated because as the world gets smaller, as borders fade out when it comes to doing business, and the number of stakeholders multiplies, the stakes have also become disproportionately high, and as a fintech or financial institution you simply cannot afford to leave anything to chance. Hence, the need for augmenting human intelligence and capacity with intelligent tools powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and relying enormously on digitization capacities and the cloud for managing, storing, and interpreting contractual information effortlessly.

Demystifying the Reasons Behind the Shift!

Though contract data management has always been a long-winded and paper-heavy process, there has been a subtle shift post covid as organizations are becoming more open to using modern technology such as AI and ML post covid 19 for addressing many of their pain points post covid. This was primarily because, during the pandemic and post-it, organizations realized that they could not leave contract data management to the legal experts and the analysts (solely) anymore – for not only was it becoming extremely time-consuming and expensive, but also manual contract data management was proving incapable of providing the desired level of scalability and deep insight that organizations required. So, here’s decoding why as a fintech or Financial Institution, Smarter Contract Lifecycle Data Management is critical for keeping pace in a changing business landscape.

A) Unstructured data in files, cabinets, and silos across the enterprise were difficult to access and update

When the pandemic struck, which was quite sudden, some organizations had either digitized their contracts and processes or hadn’t. For those who hadn’t digitized the swathes of paper agreements or the contract management process, managing contracts turned into a nightmare as accessing files from the repositories or cabinets at a minute’s notice was improbable. This probably was the biggest learning for organizations as they realized that digitization or cloud solutions/cloud-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) enabled a level of business continuity that was not possible when you were relying simply on paper agreements or contracts. If the challenge posed by unstructured data was not enough, the existence of structured data such as the ones in public repositories with multiple stakeholders and existing in silos enterprise-wide constituted another major challenge during the pandemic for the same reason of lack of accessibility.

B) Staying in control was difficult as there was limited visibility into data

In 2020, the number of Force Majeure clauses invoked was a record high in many parts of the world. The force majeure clause implies an Act of God or some unforeseen circumstance, man-made or natural disaster that makes it difficult to fulfill certain obligations of the contract. By invoking this clause in the contract, the parties involved can protect themselves from liabilities that arise due to their failure to provide a certain service or product. Interestingly, the force majeure clause was rarely invoked prior to the pandemic, and if we were to go by the findings of the World Commerce & Contracting Report on the latest Most Negotiated Terms, 2022, it ranks a low 26 in the list of the most negotiated terms, but post the pandemic, it was one of the oft-invoked clauses.

In 2020, the number of Force Majeure clauses invoked was a record high in many parts of the world. The force majeure clause implies an Act of God or some unforeseen circumstance, man-made or natural disaster that makes it difficult to fulfill certain obligations of the contract. By invoking this clause in the contract, the parties involved can protect themselves from liabilities that arise due to their failure to provide a certain service or product. Interestingly, the force majeure clause was rarely invoked prior to the pandemic, and if we were to go by the findings of the World Commerce & Contracting Report on the latest Most Negotiated Terms, 2022, it ranks a low 26 in the list of the most negotiated terms, but post the pandemic, it was one of the oft-invoked clauses.

Today, it would not be hard to imagine how tricky, tiresome, and time-consuming would it be for a human, whether a legal expert or an analyst to skim manually past the swathes of paper contracts or public repositories for finding the terms and conditions associated with clauses such as termination, scope and goals, payment and payment options, data privacy, services levels, acceptance, regulatory compliance among others, and keeping up-to-date and in case of conditions such as the force majeure compliance among others, and keeping up-to-date and in case of conditions such as the force majeure how an untoward incident would have an impact on the organization. Considering the fast-paced business environment that the banks and FinTechs are operating in, finding, updating, and validating the relevant information manually is totally undesirable. However, with intelligent contract data management solutions, and automated solutions, it takes no time to extract, update, validate and monitor information that is required for keeping up to date.

C) Making intelligent decisions was difficult without appropriate tools, approaches, and technology

During the contract data management lifecycle, organizations get the best value from the services or products that must make intelligent decisions. They must access data quicker and faster than ever before. However, with data existing in silos, and in multiple formats, a data swamp builds up over the course of time. In order to make intelligent decisions faster, all data about a particular contract must be in one place instead of clustered everywhere. Using a combination of intelligent tools, powered with artificial intelligence and rules-based engines with capacities for learning and robust data management practices and metadata – a unique identifier without which one would have to wade to tons of data, organizations can take accurate and on-time decisions.

D) The realization that a centralized source of truth is more readily accessible than a file or a cabinet or data in silos

A unique centralized repository where you can store all your data in a digital format is better equipped to handle the challenges of the next-gen contract management lifecycle than the outdated physical file or cabinet. It is bestowed with dynamism thanks to automation, a unique digital repository centralized repository where it is readily available along with metadata, making it much more convenient for organizations than a filing cabinet or a siloed existence.

The Future in Simplicity

Contract data management does not end with the negotiations and signing of the contract between the parties. There is a lot of work that goes in the management of a contract such as keeping up to date, remaining compliant, and realizing maximum benefits, and for that contract management must be made simpler so that there is on-time/on-demand information.

As a financial institution, if you are unable to access information about the contract that you have signed in time and make decisions accordingly, you expose yourself to needless disputes and wranglings later, and are burdened with higher costs, poor performance, unnecessary risks, etc. Contract intelligence solutions begin by centralizing and streamlining contracts providing visibility into all contract data, thus empowering the organization to efficiently monitor all contractual and regulatory compliance obligations. That is the first step to simplifying it.

In the next blog, we will tackle the tools and technologies that make contract management more intelligent and how Magic DeepSight^TM enables it. Magic’s DeepSight^TM the process optimization platform along with our Advisory practice provides a configured solution that acts as a virtual assistant to the analyst thereby reducing the complexity of the task. It automates standard processes to reduce errors and omissions and enables the less experienced and less skilled analysts to be able to perform their tasks. Stay Tuned!