The Standard Takes a More Strategic Approach to Sourcing with Icertis

Challenge

Total contract visibility needed to support commercial and compliance goals

As a highly regulated insurance provider, The Standard manages complex relationships with thousands of vendors across a broad ecosystem of services and software.

Proper management of these contracts is essential to both The Standard’s commercial performance and its regulatory compliance posture.

“ The first thing regulators ask when they show up is, ‘Show us your contracts,’” says Derek Dansby, Director of Support Services. 

Recently, Dansby and his team embarked on a digital transformation journey to improve how they managed supplier contracts both pre- and post-signature. Goals included meeting regulatory requirements from insurance departments, tailoring agreements to the appropriate level of business risk, and ensuring the company was getting the best value possible from its providers.

A key use case is in mergers and acquisitions, when The Standard needs to integrate contracts from newly acquired legal entities. “You inherit their contracts too,” Dansby explains. “One of the exercises you have to do is tell the story to the business—‘Hey, we have an agreement with Company X, and they have an agreement with Company X.’”

Without a robust contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution in place, it can be difficult to do a side-by-side comparison of the two agreements to determine which is the better contract.

Solution

A single source of truth for all procurement contracts

To modernize its approach, The Standard implemented the Icertis Contract Intelligence platform as the centralized system for all third-party contracts. This transformation allowed the company to move beyond basic document storage to a fully operationalized contract intelligence framework—supporting both day-to-day procurement and strategic initiatives like M&A and third-party risk management.

The Icertis platform now plays a pivotal role in The Standard’s ability to gain total visibility into their supplier contracts and generate data that helps the company understand where they stand.

“ With Icertis, you move your high-skilled labor from data entry to storytelling and advising your customers, your internal stakeholders,” Dansby said.

In M&A scenarios, Icertis gives the procurement team a clear lens into contract terms from both legacy and acquired entities:  “You can use it to say, ‘This contract has better payment terms, better limitations of liability... but this one has better SLAs and pricing.’ And then you can really sit down and guide the business,” Dansby explained.

Third-party risk is also better managed through integrations with risk management tools and the Icertis platform’s contract rules engine. “You don't need to put a 40-page master services agreement on every single contract,” said Dansby. Based on how a relationship is “scored” by the Standard’s third-party risk management (TPRM) tool, Icertis provides guidance on how to draft the contract. “You write the contract relative to the risk. That’s how we use our integrations between our risk tools and our templates.”

Benefits

Better efficiency, bigger savings across procurement operations

With Icertis, The Standard has transformed procurement from a transactional function into a strategic business enabler. Dansby reports measurable improvements across efficiency, savings, and compliance:

• A 25% reduction in repetitive transactional contracts
• Automated compliance tracking tied to expiration and termination events
• Ability to capture five to six times employee cost in savings—a benchmark that Dansby calls “the gold standard”

For Danbsy’s team, it’s been a force multiplier for delivering value to the organization.

“We’re a small team, but we’re pretty mighty in what we can do,” he said.