Conga CLM helps AXA manage contract lifecycles while mitigating risk 

AXA S.A., a $90B global financial institution headquartered in Paris, is one of the world’s largest property and casualty reinsurers, with a position in all global markets. The company is in the business of retroceding part of its risk to the market for other insurers so that when there are monumental catastrophes such as natural disasters or bridge collapses, AXA does not bear the sole financial burden.

Challenge

Although the total number of reinsurance providers is unimpressive, it involves a staggering amount of money. The small number of companies who work in the industry explains why off-the-shelf technology solutions have not met industry specific use cases directly in the past. In AXA’s case, multiple custom contracts require execution in each deal. Acceptation contracts are used between AXA entities and AXA Group. Then part of the risk from those contracts is retroceded to the reinsurance market, requiring retrocession contracts which are encapsulated within the acceptation contracts.  

This manual cycle between both contract types raised increasing complexity for AXA that they needed to find a solution for that would allow them to both efficiently scale and increase visibility for the organization so they could carefully mitigate away risk for the business. Additionally, they knew that every clause must be carefully reviewed by multiple organizations because gaps in the legal language could open AXA to unwanted business risk. AXA’s past solution did not have a functional clause library, making this a large challenge for the organization to handle manually.

AXA quickly realized they had outgrown the organization’s previous solution, which included multiple manual steps leaving the door open to human error and risk. Since the company was now running on Salesforce, it wanted a compatible contract lifecycle management (CLM) product that could adapt to all the nuances in enterprise contract processing and support a growing clause library.  

Solution

In Conga CLM, AXA found a solution which seamlessly integrated with Salesforce, which runs the company’s essential treaty placement module and conducts risk modeling and data analysis. The treaty placement model is simply the given name for the company’s management process within Salesforce of the acceptation and retrocession contracts that allow them to retrocede their risk to the reinsurance market. Treaties are an important part of the reinsurance business, acting as the contract between the ceding insurance company and the reinsurer. With Conga CLM and leveraging 27 new merge fields, there are no longer data gaps between systems, ensuring that the treaty modules are accurate. Having to fill data gaps slows down contract processing and also introduces an additional risk factor, something this industry has very little tolerance for.

People can review contracts efficiently with tracked changes using Conga CLM and X-Author, which keeps the contract formatting intact using Microsoft Word. This was important to AXA because Word has such a high level of adoption that very little training and change management was needed for this part of the deployment. With more than 7,000 clauses in each renewal period, integration of the clause library was non-negotiable. In addition, the team relies heavily on the “Send for Review” function to reduce back and forth over email, providing evidence of each activity related to the contract and saving precious time.  

“We are sure that we are ISO compliant and reduced the amount of internal auditing that we need to do because we can now track the Deposit Mode,” says Xavier Leon, AXA Domain Manager. Deposit Mode ensures that cash, a letter or other assets are part of the contract, and easily accessible.

A French systems integrator, with deep Salesforce expertise, helped manage the implementation alongside the added expertise of the Conga Professional Services team. Despite the large effort to get Salesforce and Conga CLM working together on a strict and non-negotiable deadline there was no critical downtime across the business. “Conga put in a lot of effort to help us reach our goals,” says Leon. “We did it on time, and on schedule.”

Results

First and foremost, the automation and standardization that Conga CLM provided enabled AXA to sign 20% more contracts in the first month of the year as compared to the same month the previous year. Streamlining the complex contracts portfolio management between its parent company and its reinsurance clients, all part of AXA’s commitment to using modern technology to analyze the risk vs return its shares with its clients, was a secondary yet not-any-less-significant benefit as it freed up valuable back-end resources.

With Conga CLM and leveraging 27 new merge fields, AXA’s risk is greatly mitigated because merged fields come from the system of record and not from manual data entry, which can introduce errors. Reducing process redundancy, leveraging standardized templates, and speeding time-to-executed-contract has given the company’s reinsurance customers and internal team a better user experience.

The success of this project phase has led to AXA’s next project with Conga — using Conga Contract Intelligence. The artificial intelligence cloud platform imports and extracts terms, fields, and clauses from contracts, helping AXA fill in gaps in historical documentation and managing localization.  

Business outcomes

• Signed 20% more contracts in the first month of the year as compared to the same month the previous year
• Created 27 merge fields, up from seven  
• Created eight templates to increase business efficiency
• Launched new Specialty acceptance amendments
• Launched AXA Group Cover, a data extraction tool for the technical accounting team