Volody Aims To Make Legal Compliance Paperless In The Post-Covid World

Even as Indian businesses start bringing parts of their operations online and digitise their ways, there’s a long way to go to catch up with tech-mature markets. For instance, India has only 0.1% penetration when it comes to contract lifecycle management (CLM) software usage, whereas the US market has about 53% penetration.

Even so, the US figure is considered to be low, particularly compared to other enterprise tools and applications. And even in this market, it’s largely the large corporates that are adopting CLM and other legal tech solutions, according to Volody founder Dinesh Sharma.

Now, with uncertainties caused due to Covid-19, and remote working in place, enterprises are realising the importance of legaltech platforms, as the majority of the physical legal documents and contracts are stuck at office locations.

Mumbai-based Volody is working towards automating the legal process for businesses across various departments. From drafting legal agreements to negotiations, approvals, signing and managing data, it also provides compliance management-related solutions.

Furthermore, the founder said that in the last four months, the company has witnessed an increase in enquiries from prominent players including Reliance, Hindustan Unilever, and Mahindra Group among others, and not just small businesses looking to digitise and automate legal processes.

Besides contract management solutions, Volody currently has developed new solutions for enterprises, which includes board meeting, insider trading compliance management, litigation management, secretarial automation among others. For instance, its board meeting software automatically records and documents minute-to-minute updates of the discussions, agenda, stores data securely, voting polls, report action, attendance management and more. Insider trading compliance tool, on the other hand, helps company securities and compliance officers to monitor, follow and track all the compliances related to insider trading.

Founded in May 2015, Volody is a brainchild of Sharma, a non-techie and an industry veteran with over two decades of experience in finance, accounting, legal and compliance functions and has handled global acquisitions, cross-border loan syndication and mergers. Prior to this, he has worked in senior leadership roles at CRISIL, Techprocess Solutions, and Hypro Real Estate Bank, Deutsche Bank among others.

Covid-19 And A Paperless Business

Besides social distancing and remote working, one of the things that people are worried about today is touching a piece of paper, and there isn’t a technology that can disinfectant hundreds and thousands of paper while singing a contract, and the only way to eliminate this fear is to leverage digital software and tools and automate workflow, shared Sharma.

Further, he said that a majority of corporates have about tens and thousands of paper contracts, and it becomes difficult to make sense of the information. Volody said that it has a unique feature where the user can upload the documents online, and its machine learning algorithm built on PHP-ML will churn 80-90% of unstructured data into structured data so that businesses can make informed decisions. “This is where we are bringing innovation, process automation and new solutions,” he added.

Volody’s automated contract lifecycle management system solution includes features for governance of documents, onboarding offline contracts, obligation management, risky clause detection and risk management among others.

Further, a chatbot-like virtual wizard assists individuals and teams in building legal agreements and contracts on the go. The contract lifecycle management application is also available on Apple App Store for convenient use. The company currently follows a subscription, per-user model for team size lesser than 10 employees, and above that follows an enterprise model, where it charges on a per team or department basis.

Volody claims to guarantee seven-day implementation time for enterprises, right from building a personalised platform for agreement templates, clause library, approval flows, user access rights, digital signing and management of executed contracts. It also uses machine learning-based algorithms for onboarding of legacy contracts, API integration for third-party enterprise tools, cloud, big data platforms and document management.

In terms of the target audience, Volody caters to the need of general counsels, compliance officers and CEO offices at large enterprises, startups and corporations. Its clients include SIDBI, Wellness Forever, 91Springboard, Cipla, Centrum, Mannapuram, Embassy Group, Dr Reddy’s. L’OREAL, Nykaa, Flexi Loans. Overall, the company claims to have about 65 clients currently using its CLM software.

Optimistic about the market post-Covid-19, Sharma said that Volody is on track to add ten new clients to its portfolio by December 2020, with expansion into the US, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Japan, and other Southeast Asia regions in next two years. In March 2019, the company claimed to have seen revenues double from the previous year.

SaaS Market Explodes

Sharing plans to acquire new clients, Sharma said that the company is aggressively marketing on Google ads, email campaigns to boost digital reach. “In addition to this, we have also started partnering with players who are selling complementary products like procurement software and CRM software.”

According to a MarketsAndMarkets report, the global contract management software market is expected to touch $2.9 Bn by 2024, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 13.5%, from $1.5 Bn in 2019. The growth is said to be fueled by the demand for efficient contract management tools that let businesses manage the ever-rising contract volumes across the globe.

Supporting the digital transformation, several enterprise tech companies are burgeoning in the CLM landscape, where both native and global enterprise tech players like Volody, RevvSales, Newgen Software Technologies, Icertis, Ultria, Sirion Labs, Optimus BT, Adlib, SpringCM, Symfact, Apttus and Zycus among others, are offering cutting-edge technology solutions to digitise contract management system.

As for the edge over the competition, Sharma said that Volody’s integrated do-it-yourself (DIY) features makes contract lifecycle management systems usable as per business needs so it can be customised according to scale.

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