How Leonteq moved to paperless meetings with Sherpany

Swiss company Leonteq was facing the challenge of having a very time-consuming meeting process involving executives and board members. Besides investing money and energy in organising these recurring meetings, the company required considerable efforts from its employees by printing hundreds of documents for the meetings.

While regular board and board committee meetings could include up to more than 500 document pages - in 2017 the board of directors held 13 meetings and 10 conference calls - executive committee meetings, held twice a month, required from 200 to 300 printed document pages. Within a year, an average of 7200 pages would be printed for the executive committee only. ‘We needed to print out a lot of documents and set up physical folders for each board member’, explained to us Dominik Ruggli, Head of Investor Relations and Communications.

Additionally, the audit committee, the risk committee and the nomination committee held another 17 meetings and 7 conference calls. The effort in meetings and board documents preparation was tedious and the need to reduce time and resources allocated to executive, board and committee meetings preparation was obvious.

Searching for an easy-to-use and comprehensive solution

To improve the meeting management process, Leonteq started searching and evaluating a set of possible solutions. The company compiled a list with mandatory criteria - considered essential for a successful adoption of the new solution. User-friendliness, quick and easy user setup, a continuous maintenance of the solution, and a short implementation time needed to be ensured by the future provider.

Sherpany, the meeting management software, was among the several providers and different products invited for a presentation and ended up being considered the best solution to fulfill the company’s needs. Leonteq chose Sherpany instead because of the easy handling of access rights and user setups, flexible access via multiple devices and specifically the possibility of downloading the application for tablets, eliminating the need to carry paper around.

Beyond paperless meetings with Sherpany

Since Leonteq started using Sherpany it became particularly fond of some features: easy and quick creation of agendas, immediate upload and update of all relevant documents for each meeting topic of the executive and board committee. ‘Changes to uploaded documents, which are required frequently, are done within seconds’ and the ‘meeting preparation for members of the board and the executive committee is simplified and does not require members to dig through tons of emails or paperwork’, stated Ruggli, highlighting some of the key benefits of going paperless.

Sherpany perceives companies that embrace digital transformation as more than customers. Customers become partners whose voices count when it comes to product improvement. ‘Sherpany takes customer feedback very seriously and is fast in implementing improvements to the system.’

This transition from traditional meetings to digital meetings was essential to support Leonteq’s goals: decrease time and resources allocated to meeting organisation. ‘Printing out documents and maintaining a big physical archive for all the folders and documents became obsolete.’ However, Leonteq moved far beyond paperless meetings. With Sherpany the focus was driven back into the output of meetings and the outcome was the increased efficiency of the CEO and the Corporate Office.

Just like Leonteq, several companies are facing today the challenges of operational overload in their meeting organisation and preparation. This demanding challenge is common to diverse roles within the organisation, from the CEO, to the corporate secretary, to the board member and it is affecting their focus. Meeting digitisation allows for paperless processes and goes beyond - increasing significantly the company’s leaders efficiency and concentration.