A mid-size bank typically manages between 5,000 and 15,000 active contracts. These include facility agreements, vendor contracts, service level agreements, lease agreements, insurance policies, outsourcing contracts, employment agreements, and regulatory submissions.

Virtually all of them are in PDF or Word format. Many are scanned paper documents. Some date back 10 or 15 years. The bank’s compliance team cannot search across them. The legal team cannot extract obligations from them. The treasury team cannot track financial covenants. Nobody knows what is in the portfolio without opening each file individually.

Banks that cannot search their contract portfolio face three categories of risk:

Regulatory risk. Regulators increasingly require banks to demonstrate visibility into their contractual obligations. A bank that cannot produce a list of all contracts with a specific counterparty, or all contracts governed by a specific law, is exposed.

Financial risk. Auto-renewal clauses, penalty triggers, and financial covenants that are buried in PDFs go unmonitored. The result: unexpected costs, missed savings opportunities, and unhedged exposure.

Operational risk. When a key vendor relationship needs to be reviewed — during a merger, a regulatory inquiry, or a dispute — the bank’s legal team spends days or weeks manually reviewing contracts that should be searchable in seconds.

Catalogue every contract by department, counterparty, contract type, and format (PDF, Word, scanned). Prioritise by risk: start with facility agreements and vendor contracts, which carry the highest obligation density.

Drop each file into Pactum. The conversion happens in the browser — client-side, no server involved. PDF and .docx files are converted to structured HTML. Scanned documents go through OCR first. Average conversion time: under 10 seconds per file.

As each contract is converted, Pactum’s AI obligation detection engine scans every clause. Obligations are extracted automatically with bearer, deadline, consequence, and risk level. No manual review required for the initial extraction.

Run the converted portfolio against the bank’s playbook. Flag contracts with non-standard terms: uncapped indemnities, non-compliant governing law, missing force majeure, payment terms outside policy. Prioritise remediation.

All new contracts are drafted in Pactum’s HTML editor. Legacy contracts are now searchable. The entire portfolio — old and new — lives in the same structured, machine-readable format on the bank’s own cloud infrastructure.