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Marshfield guided us through every step of CLM automation, and they made the transition smoother than I could have ever imagined. As soon as I saw our first few letters go out the door and get signed by customers, I knew we had made the right call.
Andrew Bennett - Chief Executive Officer, Provide
Overview
A leading financial services provider in the healthcare sector tapped Marshfield Consulting to automate approval letters and similar documents for its proprietary loan origination software, dramatically boosting the company’s document-generation speed, accuracy, and compliance.
The Challenge
Provide, a division of Fifth Third Bank, N.A., has since its founding in 2013 worked to streamline the lending process for healthcare practice owners. But on the back end, loan approval letters morphed into increasingly complicated and nuanced documents as deal sizes and types evolved with the company’s early growth.
Originally, Provide salespeople handled approval letter generation with a homegrown Microsoft Word template, but this approach couldn’t accommodate the multiple loans, various guarantors, complex structures, and numerous closing conditions that require a highly dynamic input form. As the team expanded, manually maintaining consistent language and processes became exceptionally time-consuming and difficult.
At the time, Provide already relied on Docusign for the eSignature step of approval letter execution, and hoped to use Docusign CLM to manage every aspect of approval letter generation and processing. But given the document’s complexity, Docusign CLM’s out-of-the-box options couldn’t support the team’s need for reliable, efficient approval letter automation.
Marshfield’s Solution
Andrew Bennett, now CEO of Provide, was VP of Operations in 2018 when he first contacted Marshfield seeking a Docusign CLM automation to:
- Support the complexity of the approval letter template
- Integrate seamlessly with DocuSign
- Offer an intuitive interface for Provide team members
- Enforce proper controls around document generation and language consistency
After the first call, Andrew knew Marshfield’s deep expertise with complex Docusign CLM automations was the right fit for Provide. “Docusign’s support team is great, but there’s no way we could’ve built what we did without the expertise of specialists like Marshfield,” Andrew said.
Provide’s approval letters involved hundreds of variables, making the documents incredibly complex to generate — and to keep accurate. The Marshfield team designed an approval letter template in Docusign CLM that populates all necessary fields to produce a dynamic and accurate letter which, owing to how it is sent for signature via DocuSign eSignature immediately after creation, helps mitigate the risk of edits or manual modifications of the form by either an internal or external user. Upon completion and execution, finalized approval letters are stored within Docusign CLM, including a complete activity history and audit trail.
Many financial services companies still rely on Word templates as their primary document-generation tool. If your document needs to be generated in a consistent fashion, maintain compliance, and include dynamic inputs, Marshfield's expertise in Docusign CLM automations and workflows is certainly worth considering.
Andrew Bennett - Chief Executive Officer, Provide
Benefits & Results
Provide now generates hundreds of approval letters each month using CLM. Andrew estimates that Marshfield’s automations have decreased document-processing time by as much as 50%, in addition to significantly boosting contract accuracy and consistency. “The efficiency is great,” said Andrew, “but it’s the degree of uniformity of the document across such high volume that’s maybe been most impactful for the business.”
From an audit and compliance perspective, Andrew has witnessed “an enormous difference.” The risk of erroneous letters or information being routed to customers is substantially reduced with minimal manual data entry, and all approval letters are generated from a single source of truth.
Since first partnering with Marshfield in 2018, Provide has expanded its Docusign CLM implementation to different loan types, new deal structures, and the addition of various fee types and accompanying ACH authorizations. When Provide recently introduced rate lock options to give borrowers more flexibility, for example, the Marshfield team updated the standard template to enable customers to select their desired rate lock duration with ease. “It’s rare for us to have a quarter where we don’t ship at least a few meaningful enhancements to our CLM templates to better serve our borrowers,” Bennett says.
Provide continues to turn to Marshfield for automations and improvements that better support the business and customer experience. “Marshfield shares our innovation mindset,” Andrew concluded. “If we launch a new product that requires CLM automation or template modifications, Marshfield always listens carefully to the needs of the business and then figures out a way to make it happen.”
Marshfield shares our innovation mindset. If we launch a new product that requires CLM automation or template modifications, Marshfield always figures out a way to make it happen.
Andrew Bennett - Chief Executive Officer, Provide
