Contract analysis in 25 minutes instead of 8 hours – an advantage in negotiations with payment providers

The company, which serves online retailers in four European Union countries, worked with seven payment providers. Each contract runs to 60–90 pages, and every provider describes its fees according to its own structure, making a reliable comparison of offers difficult.

Every quarter, the CFO and the controller renegotiated terms with several providers. Simply comparing a new proposal with the existing contract took eight hours – with three or four negotiations, almost a full week of work before discussions had even begun.

The most time-consuming task was estimating what the company would pay under the new terms, given its actual transaction profile. These calculations were performed manually in spreadsheets, which was labour-intensive and prone to error.

Together with the CFO and the controller, we compiled a catalogue of every fee type and pricing model used by the providers. This allows the assistant to correctly distinguish between clauses that sound similar but have very different financial consequences.

The assistant operates in Microsoft Teams. The controller submits a new contract and within minutes receives a comparison with the current terms: the scope of changes, potential risks and the monthly cost, calculated from actual transactions over the previous three months.

We tested the solution on contracts from three providers, with every result verified by the controller. After three improvement cycles, the assistant correctly identified 96% of key changes. The remaining cases involved unusual clauses that, by design, require legal review.

Work that used to take a week every quarter now takes half a day. The finance team devotes the time regained to discussions with providers, the review of unusual clauses and budget planning, while recommendations prepared for the CFO are more complete and better documented.

In the first year, more favourable terms delivered savings in the tens of thousands of euros. Among other things, the assistant detected gradual quarterly increases in one provider's currency conversion fee, as well as a minimum monthly volume clause of which the company had been unaware.

The dynamics of negotiations have changed as well. The company now enters discussions with ready calculations based on its own data, and two providers have proposed more favourable terms on their own initiative.