Contractual onboarding and supplier qualification, especially when regulation and controls require human work, are often characterised by delays and frustration, as comprising numerous players and moving parts. The vendor completes an onboarding form that includes general and financial information. This stage might also involve the legal team, to ensure it from a legal, compliance, and security standpoint. Once the form is properly completed, the finance team must manually enter the information into the company’s ERP system.

When this process takes place in siloed systems, it is seriously limiting for the different parties involved and it entails a transparency issue related to the overall onboarding process and the various “sub-processes”. Today, most companies are struggling with an outdated approach to supplier onboarding that still involves broken communication chains, unnecessary delays, and error-prone manual tasks. An effective onboarding process is strategic for the procurement and the sales whose main responsibilities are ensuring that the company acts in an effective and cost-reasonable manner and that the whole supplier experience would be smooth and satisfying. With the storage of vendor-related information and communication with the business happening separately, procurement is often brought into the process later and this doubles his work.

For the supplier itself, the delays and lack of transparency he experiences as part of the company’s onboarding process might make him perceive that the company isn’t entirely committed to establishing positive partnerships and that other processes like payment, will also be burdensome. Automated supplier acquisition and verification processes, can easily reduce human error and mitigate risks or simply support a healthy business relationship. This modern approach enables every relevant part to easily understand where processes stand, and who is responsible for completing the next step.

Aligned with an organisation’s ERP and other systems already in place, all supplier data and research carried out on the controls, are always connected with the procedures for activating a service. When all is synced and easily tracked, the bottlenecks generated by manual work are definitely deleted. Embracing automation like automated supplier acquisition and verification processes produced by distributed ledger technology is fundamentally changing market structure ecosystems.

Trakti platform, based on blockchain, can help to combine the contract with the controls. It is all done at the same time.

By automating the monitoring of the Vendor Rating, the supplier can be rated to give information on its reliability and the data can be found directly within the vendor management or ERP system. Any changes can be spotted in real-time on Trakti which can also provide KYC and AML integrations with third-party software to simplify control, monitoring, audit, ID, and credit checks of vendors or customers to verify and validate they are compliant with company laws, regulations, and standards.

Thanks to the power of blockchain, on Trakti the results are automatically shown in the system as they are not decontextualized. The data is filled in by the supplier and the information in the fields is automatically transferred to monitoring and control systems. The compliance manager can approve by seeing both data and contract at the same time and he automatically switches to signature without any manual activities foreseen to date. “Technology age is now” – reported Richard Evans, Head of Account Management at W2 Global Data, provider of a full site of identity verification and anti-money laundering compliance service.

“KYC and AML checks are required by the majority of industries and sectors” – explained Richard Evans during the last webinar with Trakti (07:50): “During a supplier onboarding it becomes a crucial step”(…) ”Automation is important, and the adoption of a platform, based on a compliant ledger, all integrated with one, as Trakti, reduces the risk of mistakes and helps set up a successful and compliant process that can surely make a company grow, cut on resources, and increase its brand reputation.” (28:04)

In March 2022 LawtechUK issued a joint statement that confirmed that legal services regulation does not prohibit the use of digital ID verification tools in any of the jurisdictions of the UK. A responsible selection, adoption, and implementation of these tools therefore can contribute to improving compliance practices across the legal sector.

Jenifer Swallow, Director of LawtechUK stated that “Digital identity technology has become a valuable tool in combating money laundering risk across industries worldwide”.

These tools can speed up supplier acquisition and verification and reduce the complexity for practitioners to both comply and evidence compliance to regulations. With Trakti Smart legal contracts, mastering contract onboarding via an end-to-end platform that supports the entire life-cycle of your contract will be much easier. Both Sales and Procurement teams can increase suppliers’ and clients’ engagement rates, validate customers to activate a new service in a click, speed up vendor onboarding and qualification processes, and enhance contractual flow.

At Trakti, we speed up the process to reduce complexity.

If you want to watch the entire webinar, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cMHmNyCHTU