Streamlining Mandate Management in Corporate Finance

Overview

In corporate finance, mandates are formal agreements that authorise a financial institution to act on behalf of clients in complex, high-value transactions, such as acquisitions, project financing, or capital raising. These agreements must undergo rigorous validation to ensure they are legally sound, compliant with internal policies, and aligned with regulatory obligations. To streamline this process, a private bank partnered with AMO to design a bespoke application that digitises the full lifecycle of corporate finance mandates. The platform enables bankers to initiate mandates, routes them through structured validation workflows involving compliance, legal, and management committees, and automates the generation of legally binding contracts.

The Challenge: Disconnected Processes and Manual Workarounds

As the bank’s corporate finance activity grew, its reliance on manual mandate management became a significant barrier to growth, scalability and control. Mandates were created and circulated using Word documents and email chains, with no central system to track progress, approvals, or document versions. This led to inefficiencies and operational risk.

Challenges included:

• No clear tracking of who had reviewed or approved mandates, increasing compliance risk.
• Limited visibility into decision histories and validation progress.
• Delays in onboarding new mandates and responding to client demands.
• Difficulties in maintaining consistency across mandate formats, especially for different operation types (acquisition, sale, project financing, etc.).
• Delays in approvals due to lack of automated reminders or escalation.
• Compliance and legal reviews were handled outside the workflow, with limited traceability.
• Document versioning and contract generation lacked standardisation and control.

These challenges introduced friction into what should be a highly controlled process, creating risks for both client service delivery and regulatory compliance.

The Solution: A Custom Workflow-Driven Platform for Mandate Management

AMO developed a secure, workflow-based application designed to manage the full mandate lifecycle within the bank’s Corporate Finance division. Built to meet both operational and compliance needs, it enables seamless collaboration across business lines while embedding traceability and control at every step.

Platform Features

Compliance Oversight & Risk Management

The application integrates compliance validation at critical checkpoints in the mandate lifecycle, involving structured reviews from legal, compliance, and risk teams. Each mandate is evaluated based on its transaction type and risk profile, ensuring it aligns with internal policies, anti-corruption standards, and data protection regulations. Compliance requirements automatically adapt based on the nature of the mandate whether it’s for acquisitions, sales, or project financing, ensuring that appropriate approval steps are triggered for each scenario.

Full Traceability & Audit Readiness

Every action within the platform, including mandate creation, edits, validation steps, comments, and decisions, is time-stamped and permanently recorded. Detailed records support both internal audits and regulatory inspections, ensuring the bank remains compliant with governance frameworks and financial industry regulations. All mandate-related data, validations, and supporting documents are consolidated in a single source of truth, ensuring accountability and enabling forensic-level traceability when needed.

Strategic Reporting & Analytics

Administrators and compliance officers can generate reports, monitor activity, and extract audit-ready data across departments. Internal teams can configure workflows, manage reference data, and maintain platform governance without external dependencies.

Approval Workflows

Mandates undergo validation by multiple stakeholders, each empowered to approve, reject, or reserve the decision, with all inputs logged and linked. Email alerts and reminders are triggered at each stage to keep relevant stakeholders informed and prevent bottlenecks.

Contract Generation & Document Management

Once a mandate is validated, a contract is automatically generated from predefined templates tailored to the type of transaction, ready for digital or manual signing. Documents can be uploaded, updated, and versioned throughout the mandate process, ensuring controlled access and traceability.

Impact: From Manual Complexity to Controlled Precision

The introduction of the mandate management application has played a pivotal role in the bank’s digital transformation, enabling it to scale corporate finance operations while strengthening compliance and governance. By replacing fragmented, manual workflows with a structured, automated platform, the bank has laid the groundwork for long-term growth and continuous innovation.

Key Benefits

• Accelerated mandate processing, reducing turnaround times for approvals and contract generation, and enabling the bank to pursue opportunities more efficiently.
• Improved cross-team collaboration, with legal, compliance, and front-office stakeholders aligned through a unified, traceable workflow.
• Enhanced auditability and transparency, ensuring that every decision is logged, reviewed, and compliant with internal policies and external regulations.
• Scalable infrastructure, allowing the bank to handle increased volumes of mandates without compromising on control or oversight.
• Innovation in governance, by embedding risk and compliance checks directly into digital workflows, reducing reliance on manual controls and increasing agility.

A Foundation for Sustainable Growth and Innovation

By investing in automation and structured workflows, the bank has not only addressed immediate operational challenges, but also positioned itself to evolve confidently in a competitive and highly regulated market. The solution is a strategic enabler for sustainable growth, operational resilience, and ongoing innovation in corporate finance. This application is a strong foundation for managing high-stakes financial agreements in private banking. With the ability to support further integrations such as e-signature, archival systems, or client-facing modules, it positions the bank for continued digital transformation in a secure, controlled, and collaborative environment.